Excel 2010: The Missing Manual [1 ed.] 1449382355, 9781449382353

Citation preview

Excel 2010 THE MISSING MANUAL The book that should have been in the box®ˇ

Excel 2010

Matthew MacDonald

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo

Excel 2010: The Missing Manual Matthew MacDonald Copyright © 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly Media books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles: http://my.safaribooksonline.com. For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or corporate@ oreilly.com.

June 2010:

First Edition.

The Missing Manual is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The Missing Manual logo, and “The book that should have been in the box” are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media is aware of a trademark claim, the designations are capitalized. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained in it.

This book uses a durable and lexible lay-lat binding.

ISBN: 9781449382353 [CS]

Table of Contents

The Missing Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part One: Worksheet Basics Chapter 1: Creating Your First Spreadsheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Creating a Basic Worksheet . . . . . . . . . . . Starting a New Workbook . . . . . . . . . Adding the Column Titles . . . . . . . . . Adding Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moving Around the Grid . . . . . . . . . . . . Shortcut Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Go To Feature . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Tour of the Excel Window. . . . . . . . . . . The Tabs of the Ribbon . . . . . . . . . . . The Formula Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Status Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Going Backstage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Excel Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saving Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Excel File Format . . . . . . . . . . . . Sharing Your Spreadsheet with Excel 2007 Saving Your Spreadsheet for Excel 2003 . . Saving a Spreadsheet in Other Formats . . Saving Your Spreadsheet As a PDF. . . . . Saving Your Spreadsheet As an HTML File. Saving Your Spreadsheet with a Password. Disaster Recovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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19 21 22 24 25 26 26 28 29 29 31 32 36 37 37 39 41 43 44 44 47 50 53

v

Opening Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Opening Recent Documents . . . . . . . . Protected View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Opening Files—with a Twist. . . . . . . . . Working with Multiple Open Spreadsheets

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Chapter 2: Adding Information to Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . . Adding Different Types of Data . . . . . . . . . . . . How Excel Identiies Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Excel Identiies Numbers . . . . . . . . . . How Excel Identiies Dates and Times . . . . . . Regional Dating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Handy Timesavers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AutoComplete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AutoCorrect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AutoFill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AutoFit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dealing with Change: Undo, Redo, and AutoRecover Undo and Redo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AutoRecover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spell Check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spell Checking Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding Hyperlinks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Link to a Web Page or Document . . Creating a Link to a Worksheet Location . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter 3: Moving Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selecting Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moving Cells Around . . . . . . . . . . Adding and Moving Columns or Rows .

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55 56 57 58 60

63 63 66 67 68 70 71 72 73 75 78 79 79 82 85 87 90 91 93

95 95 102 113

Chapter 4: Managing Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Worksheets and Workbooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding and Removing Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . Hiding Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naming and Rearranging Worksheets . . . . . . . . . Moving Worksheets from One Workbook to Another . Grouping Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Find and Replace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Basic Find . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Find All . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More Advanced Searches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finding Formatted Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finding and Replacing Values . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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118 119 121 121 123 125 127 128 129 130 133 134

Chapter 5: Formatting Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Formatting Cell Values . . . . . . . . . . Changing the Cell Value Format . . . Formatting Numbers . . . . . . . . . Formatting Dates and Times . . . . . Special Formats for Special Numbers Custom Formats . . . . . . . . . . . Formatting Cell Appearance . . . . . . . Alignment and Orientation . . . . . . Fonts and Color. . . . . . . . . . . . Borders and Fills . . . . . . . . . . . Drawing Borders by Hand . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138 139 141 146 149 150 158 159 162 167 169

Chapter 6: Smart Formatting Tricks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 The Format Painter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Styles and Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Custom Styles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modifying Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transferring Styles Between Workbooks . Themes: A Package of Styles . . . . . . . Modifying Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . Conditional Formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . The Basics of Conditional Formatting . . Highlighting Speciic Values . . . . . . . Using Multiple Rules . . . . . . . . . . .

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173 174 176 178 179 180 183 186 187 187 192

Chapter 7: Viewing and Printing Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Controlling Your View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zooming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Viewing Distant Parts of a Spreadsheet at Once . . . . . . . Freezing Columns or Rows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hiding Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saving View Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Viewing Multiple Workbooks at Once . . . . . . . . . . . . Printing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Print an Excel File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page Layout View: A Better Print Preview . . . . . . . . . . Creating Headers and Footers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Controlling Pagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page Breaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page Break Preview: A Bird’s-Eye View of Your Worksheet .

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195 196 198 201 204 205 207 210 211 217 220 222 222 223 224

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Part Two: Formulas and Functions Chapter 8: Building Basic Formulas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Creating a Basic Formula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Excel’s Order of Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cell References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Excel Formats Cells That Contain Cell References Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using a Function in a Formula . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Cell References with a Function . . . . . . . . . Using Cell Ranges with a Function . . . . . . . . . . . Excel Compatibility Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . Formula Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logical Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Formula Shortcuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Point-and-Click Formula Creation . . . . . . . . . . . Point-and-Click Formula Editing . . . . . . . . . . . . The Formulas Tab. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using the Insert Function Button . . . . . . . . . . . . Copying Formulas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Absolute Cell References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Partially Fixed References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Referring to Other Worksheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . Referring to Other Workbooks . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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227 229 231 232 234 234 236 237 239 240 243 245 245 246 247 249 252 254 256 258 258

Chapter 9: Math and Statistical Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Rounding Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ROUND(), ROUNDDOWN(), ROUNDUP(): Rounding Numbers . . . . MROUND(), CEILING(), and FLOOR(): More Rounding Functions . . . INT() and TRUNC(): Chopping Off Non-Whole Numbers . . . . . . . . EVEN() and ODD(): Rounding Up to Even or Odd Values . . . . . . . . Groups of Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SUM(): Summing Up Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . COUNT(), COUNTA(), and COUNTBLANK(): Counting Items in a List . MAX() and MIN(): Finding Maximum and Minimum Values . . . . . . LARGE(), SMALL(), and RANK(): Ranking Numbers. . . . . . . . . . . AVERAGE() and MEDIAN(): Finding Average or Median Values . . . . PERCENTILE() and PERCENTRANK(): Advanced Ranking Functions . . FREQUENCY(): Putting Numbers into Grouped Ranges . . . . . . . . . MODE(): Finding Numbers That Frequently Occur in a List . . . . . . . General Math Functions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PRODUCT(), FACT(), POWER(), and SQRT(): Products, Factorials, Powers, and Square Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . QUOTIENT() and MOD(): Higher Division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ABS() and SIGN(): Absolute Value and Determining a Number’s Sign . RAND() and RANDBETWEEN(): Generating Random Numbers . . . .

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263 264 265 266 268 268 268 269 271 272 274 275 277 279 279 280 281 281 282

GCD() and LCM(): Greatest and Least Common Denominator . . . . . COMBIN() and PERMUT(): Figuring Combinations and Permutations . Trigonometry and Advanced Math . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Advanced Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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284 285 286 289

Chapter 10: Financial Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 The World of Finance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Financial Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FV(): Future Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PV(): Present Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PMT(), PPMT(), and IPMT(): Calculating the Number of Payments You Need to Make . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . NPER(): Figuring Out How Much Time You’ll Need to Pay Off a Loan or Meet an Investment Target . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RATE(): Figuring the Interest Rate You Need to Achieve Future Value NPV() and IRR(): Net Present Value and Internal Rate of Return . . . Depreciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other Financial Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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295 296 297 300

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302

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304 305 306 309 312

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Chapter 11: Manipulating Dates, Times, and Text . . . . . . . . . 315 Manipulating Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CONCATENATE(): Joining Strings of Text Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LEFT(), MID(), and RIGHT(): Copying Portions of a Text String . . . . . . . . . . LEN(), FIND(), and SEARCH(): Counting Characters in a String. . . . . . . . . . UPPER(), LOWER(), and PROPER(): Changing Capitalization . . . . . . . . . . . TRIM() and CLEAN(): Removing Unwanted Spaces and Non-Printing Characters SUBSTITUTE(): Replacing One Sequence of Characters with Another . . . . . . TEXT(), VALUE(), FIXED(), and DOLLAR(): Converting Text to Numbers and Vice Versa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other Text Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manipulating Dates and Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Math with Dates and Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Dates and Times with Ordinary Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Date and Time Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TODAY() and NOW(): Inserting the Current Date and Time. . . . . . . . . . . . DATE() and TIME(): Dates and Times in Calculations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DAY(), MONTH(), and YEAR(): More Date Calculations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HOUR(), MINUTE(), SECOND(): More Time Calculations . . . . . . . . . . . . . WEEKDAY(): Determining the Day of the Week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DATEDIF(): Calculating the Difference Between Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DATEVALUE() and TIMEVALUE(): Converting Dates and Times into Serial Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DAYS360(): Finding Out the Number of Days Between Two Dates . . . . . . . . EDATE(): Calculating Future Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . YEARFRAC(): Calculating the Percentage of a Year Between Two Dates . . . . . EOMONTH(): Finding the Last Day of Any Month . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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315 316 316 317 319 320 320 321 323 324 325 325 326 327 327 329 330 330 332 333 335 335 336 337

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NETWORKDAYS(): Counting the Number of Business Days . WORKDAY(): Figuring Out When Days Will Fall in the Future. WEEKNUM(): Figuring Out in Which Week a Date Falls. . . .

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337 338 338

Chapter 12: Lookup, Reference, and Information Functions . . . 339 The Basic Lookup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VLOOKUP(): Vertical Lookups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HLOOKUP(): Horizontal Lookups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Advanced Lookups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MATCH(): Finding the Position of Items in a Range . . . . . . . . . . . INDEX(): Retrieving the Value from a Cell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performing a “Left Lookup” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performing a Double Lookup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OFFSET(): Shifting Cell References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other Reference and Lookup Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INDIRECT() and ADDRESS(): Working with Cell References Stored As Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TRANSPOSE(): Changing Rows into Columns and Vice Versa. . . . . . The HYPERLINK() Function: Creating a Dynamic Link. . . . . . . . . . Information Functions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The “IS” Functions: Checking the Value Inside a Cell . . . . . . . . . . TYPE() and ERROR.TYPE(): Finding a Value’s Data Type or Error Type . INFO() and CELL(): Gathering Info About Your Computer and Your Worksheet’s Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tutorial: Generating Invoices from a Product Catalog . . . . . . . . . . . .

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340 341 344 344 345 346 346 347 349 350 351 353 355 356 356 357 358 359

Chapter 13: Advanced Formula Writing and Troubleshooting . . 363 Conditions in Formulas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IF(): Building Conditional Formulas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . COUNTIF(): Counting Only the Cells You Specify . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SUMIF(): Adding Only the Cells You Specify. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . COUNTIFS() and SUMIFS(): Counting and Summing Using Multiple Criteria Descriptive Names for Cell References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating and Using a Named Range . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating Slightly Smarter Named Ranges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naming Formulas and Constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing Named Ranges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Automatically Creating Named Ranges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applying Names to Existing Formulas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variable Data Tables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a One-Variable Data Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Two-Variable Data Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Controlling Recalculation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Solving Formula Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Step-by-Step Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracing Precedents and Dependents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Error Checking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x

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363 364 365 367 368 371 372 373 375 376 378 380 382 382 384 386 387 387 389 392

Part Three: Organizing Worksheets Chapter 14: Tables: List Management Made Easy . . . . . . . . . 395 The Basics of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Table . . . . . . . . . . Formatting a Table . . . . . . . . . Editing a Table . . . . . . . . . . . Selecting Parts of a Table . . . . . . Sorting and Filtering a Table . . . . . . Applying a Simple Sort Order . . . Sorting with Multiple Criteria. . . . Sorting by Color . . . . . . . . . . Filtering with the List of Values . . . Creating Smarter Filters . . . . . . Dealing with Duplicate Rows . . . . . . Highlighting Duplicates . . . . . . . Removing Duplicates Automatically Performing Table Calculations . . . . . Dynamic Calculations . . . . . . . Column Names . . . . . . . . . . . Table Names . . . . . . . . . . . . The Total Row . . . . . . . . . . . . The SUBTOTAL() Function . . . . . The Database Functions . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

396 396 399 402 404 405 406 407 410 411 413 415 416 417 418 419 421 421 422 423 425

Chapter 15: Grouping and Outlining Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 Basic Data Grouping . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Group . . . . . . . . . . . Nesting Groups Within Groups . . . . Summarizing Your Data . . . . . . . . Combining Data from Multiple Tables . Grouping Timesavers . . . . . . . . . . . . Auto Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Automatic Subtotaling . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

429 430 434 436 438 440 441 441

Chapter 16: Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 Understanding Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a New Workbook from a Template . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Downloading Templates (Method 1: From Backstage View) . . . Downloading Templates (Method 2: The Ofice Online Website) . Creating Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Custom Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Building a Custom Template . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sharing Templates with Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

446 447 448 450 454 454 456 458

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Part Four: Charts and Graphics Chapter 17: Creating Basic Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 Charting 101 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Embedded and Standalone Charts . . . . . . . Creating a Chart with the Ribbon . . . . . . . The Chart Tools Ribbon Tabs . . . . . . . . . . Basic Tasks with Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moving and Resizing a Chart . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Standalone Chart . . . . . . . . . . Editing and Adding to Chart Data . . . . . . . Changing the Chart Type . . . . . . . . . . . . Printing Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Practical Charting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charts with Multiple Series of Numbers . . . . Controlling the Data Excel Plots on the X-Axis . Data That Uses a Date or Time Scale . . . . . Noncontiguous Chart Ranges . . . . . . . . . Changing the Order of Your Data Series . . . . Changing the Way Excel Plots Blank Values . . Chart Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Column . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XY (Scatter) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Donut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bubble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Radar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

462 463 463 465 466 466 468 470 470 471 472 473 473 476 478 480 481 481 482 484 484 486 486 488 489 490 491 492 493

Chapter 18: Formatting and Perfecting Charts . . . . . . . . . . . 495 Chart Styles and Layouts . . . . . . Chart Styles . . . . . . . . . . . Chart Layouts . . . . . . . . . . Adding Chart Elements . . . . . . . Adding Titles . . . . . . . . . . Adding a Legend . . . . . . . . Adding Data Labels to a Series . Adding Individual Data Labels . Adding a Data Table . . . . . . Selecting Chart Elements . . . . . .

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495 496 497 497 499 500 501 504 506 507

Formatting Chart Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coloring the Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fancy Fills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fancy Borders and Lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . Formatting Data Series and Data Points . . . . . Reusing Your Favorite Charts with Templates . . Improving Your Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Controlling a Chart’s Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding a Trendline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding Error Bars to Scientiic Data . . . . . . . Formatting 3-D Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing the Shape of a 3-D Column . . . . . . Advanced Charting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Exploding Slices in a Pie . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grouping Slices in a Pie . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaps, Widths, and Overlays in a Column Chart . Creating Combination Charts . . . . . . . . . .

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509 509 510 514 516 518 520 520 523 526 528 529 530 530 531 532 534

Chapter 19: Inserting Graphics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537 Adding Pictures to a Worksheet . . . . Inserting a Picture . . . . . . . . . Positioning and Resizing a Picture . Picture Touch-Up . . . . . . . . . . Compressing Pictures . . . . . . . Cropping and Shaping a Picture . . Picture Borders, Effects, and Styles Excel’s Clip Art Library . . . . . . . . . Drawing Shapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . Drawing a Shape . . . . . . . . . . Adding Text to a Shape . . . . . . . Selecting and Arranging Shapes . . Connecting Shapes . . . . . . . . . SmartArt . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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538 538 540 543 545 547 550 551 554 556 559 560 564 565

Part Five: Advanced Data Analysis Chapter 20: Visualizing Your Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 Data Bars . . . . . . . . . . . Editing a Formatting Rule. Fine-Tuning Data Bars . . Color Scales . . . . . . . . . . Fine-Tuning Color Scales . Icon Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . Fine-Tuning Icon Sets . . .

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570 572 573 578 578 579 581

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Sparklines . . . . . . . . Creating a Sparkline Changing the Axis . Markers . . . . . . .

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583 585 588 590

Chapter 21: Scenarios and Goal Seeking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 Using Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a New Scenario . . . . . . . . Managing Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Summary Report . . . . . . Using Goal Seek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Goal Seeking with Complex Equations . Solver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Solver . . . . . . . . . Deining a Problem in Solver . . . . . . More Advanced Solver Problems . . . Saving Solver Models . . . . . . . . . . Coniguring Solver . . . . . . . . . . .

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594 594 597 598 599 603 604 605 606 612 615 617

Chapter 22: Pivot Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621 Summary Tables Revisited . . . . . . Life Without Pivot Tables . . . . . Life with Pivot Tables . . . . . . . Building Pivot Tables . . . . . . . . . Preparing a Pivot Table . . . . . . Pivot Table Regions . . . . . . . . Laying Out a Pivot Table . . . . . Formatting a Pivot Table . . . . . Rearranging a Pivot Table . . . . Getting to the Source . . . . . . . Multi-Layered Pivot Tables . . . . . . Hiding and Showing Details . . . Fine-Tuning Pivot Table Calculations . Changing the Type of Calculation Adding a Calculated Field . . . . Filtering a Pivot Table . . . . . . . . . Report Filtering . . . . . . . . . . Slicers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Group Filtering . . . . . . . . . . Pivot Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating a Pivot Chart . . . . . . Manipulating a Pivot Chart . . . .

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622 622 624 624 626 628 629 632 633 633 635 637 639 639 640 643 643 645 650 652 653 654

Chapter 23: Analyzing Databases, XML, and Web Pages . . . . . 657 Excel and Databases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connecting to an Access Database . . . . . . . Refreshing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Source Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connecting to a SQL Server Database . . . . . Reusing Your Database Connection . . . . . . Understanding XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is XML, Really? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Rules of XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XML Files and Schemas . . . . . . . . . . . . Excel and XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mapping a Simple Document . . . . . . . . . Importing and Exporting XML . . . . . . . . . Mapping Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaining the Beneits of XML Mapping . . . . . Web Queries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Limitations of Web Queries . . . . . . . . Creating a Web Query . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Research Pane—A Web Query Alternative.

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658 659 661 664 665 668 671 671 672 675 676 677 681 683 685 686 687 687 690

Part Six: Sharing Data with the Rest of the World Chapter 24: Protecting Your Workbooks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693 Understanding Excel’s Safeguards . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Input Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Error Alert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Validation with Formulas and Cell References . Data Validation with Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Locked and Hidden Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Protecting a Worksheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Protecting the Entire Workbook . . . . . . . . . . . Protecting Cell Ranges (with More Passwords) . . . Allowing Speciic Windows Users to Edit a Range . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

693 694 695 696 698 700 702 703 705 707 709 711

Chapter 25: Worksheet Collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 715 Your Excel Identity. . . . . Preparing Your Workbook Workbook Protection . Checking for Issues . . Document Properties .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

716 716 717 718 719

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Distributing a Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sending by Email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Uploading to the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adding Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inserting a Comment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Showing and Hiding Comments . . . . . . . . . Fine-Tuning Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reviewing Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Printing Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tracking Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Switching On Change Tracking . . . . . . . . . . Understanding the Change Log . . . . . . . . . Highlighting Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examining the Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . Accepting and Rejecting Changes . . . . . . . . Merging Multiple Revisions into One Workbook Sharing Your Workbook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multiple Users Without Workbook Sharing . . . Turning On Workbook Sharing . . . . . . . . . . Workbook Sharing in Action . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

722 723 724 724 725 726 727 728 729 729 731 732 734 735 737 739 741 742 743 745

Chapter 26: Using Excel on the Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 749 Putting Your Files Online . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introducing SkyDrive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Your Web Worklow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Uploading a File to SkyDrive (Using Your Browser) . Uploading a Workbook to SkyDrive (Using Excel) . . Uploading a Workbook to a SharePoint Server . . . Viewing a File in Your SkyDrive Account . . . . . . . Viewing a File in Someone Else’s SkyDrive Account . Using the Excel Web App . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Supported Features. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saving Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collaboration: The Excel Web App’s Specialty . . . . Taking a Workbook Back to Desktop Excel. . . . . . Unsupported Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Partially Supported Features . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

750 751 753 753 756 759 760 762 764 765 768 768 770 771 773

Chapter 27: Exchanging Data with Other Programs . . . . . . . . 775 Sharing Information in Windows . Embedding and Linking Objects . Exporting Charts Out of Excel Editing a Linked Object . . . . Editing an Embedded Object . Importing Objects into Excel .

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

775 777 778 781 782 784

Transferring Data . . . . . . . Exporting Tables of Data . Importing Tables of Data . Importing Text Files . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

785 786 787 787

Part Seven: Programming Excel Chapter 28: Automating Tasks with Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 Macros 101 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Macro-Free and Macro-Enabled Workbooks . . . The Macro Recorder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relative and Absolute Recording . . . . . . . . . . Where Macros Live . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Recording a Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Playing a Macro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Macro Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trusted Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Temporary Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Trust Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Setting Up a Trusted Location . . . . . . . . . . . Creating Practical Macros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inserting a Header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alternating Row Formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . A Combined Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Placing a Macro on the Quick Access Toolbar . . . Attaching a Macro to a Button Inside a Worksheet

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

793 795 795 796 797 799 802 803 804 806 806 809 810 811 812 813 814 816

Chapter 29: Programming Spreadsheets with VBA . . . . . . . . 819 The Visual Basic Editor . . . . . . . . The Project Window . . . . . . . Modules and Macros . . . . . . . Finding and Moving Macros . . . Debugging a Macro . . . . . . . Understanding Macro Code . . . . . The Anatomy of a Macro . . . . . Objects 101 . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Properties and Methods . . Hunting for Objects . . . . . . . . Exploring the VBA Language . . . . . Entering Text in the Current Cell . Interacting with Other Cells . . . Editing Speciic Cells . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

820 820 822 824 824 826 826 828 829 830 830 831 832 833

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Formatting Cells . . . . . . . . Using Variables . . . . . . . . . Making Decisions . . . . . . . . Repeating Actions with a Loop . Creating Custom Functions. . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

834 834 836 838 839

Part Eight: Appendix Appendix A: Customizing the Ribbon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 855

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The Missing Credits

About the Author Matthew MacDonald (author) is a science and technology writer with well over a dozen books to his name. Office geeks can follow him into the word of databases with Access 2010: The Missing Manual. Web fans can build an online home with him in Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual. And human beings of all description can discover just how strange they really are in Your Brain: The Missing Manual and Your Body: The Missing Manual.

About the Creative Team Brian Sawyer (editor) is an editor for O’Reilly Media’s Head First division. He’s also served as lead editor for the company’s popular Hacks series, editor for Missing Manuals and Make: Books, and contributing editor to Craft magazine. When not writing or editing about technology, he uses it to help train for marathons (see Chapter 4 of Best Android Apps). Nellie McKesson (production editor) is a graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She lives in Brockton, Mass., and spends her spare time studying graphic design and making t-shirts (www.endplasticdesigns.com). Email: nellie@ oreilly.com. Alison O’Byrne (copyeditor) is a full-time freelance editor with over eight years’ experience specializing in corporate and government projects for international clients. She lives with her family in Dublin, Ireland. Email: [email protected]. Web: www. alhaus.com.

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Zack Barresse (technical reviewer) is a Microsoft Excel MVP and has held that title for six consecutive years. He works as a full-time fire fighter in his hometown of Boardman, Oregon, where he resides with his wife and four children. Rhea Howard (technical reviewer) is an Operations Analyst at O’Reilly Media. She lives with her partner in Berkeley, CA.

Acknowledgements Writing a book about a program as sprawling and complex as Excel is a labor of love (love of pain, that is). I’m deeply indebted to a whole host of people who helped out with this edition and the two previous ones. They include Nellie McKesson, Brian Sawyer, Peter Meyers, Sarah Milstein, and technical reviewers Zack Barresse and Rhea Howard. I also owe thanks to many people who worked to get this book formatted, indexed, and printed—you can meet many of them on the Missing Credits page. Completing this book required a few sleepless nights (and many sleep-deprived days). I extend my love and thanks to my daughters Maya and Brenna, who put up with it without crying most of the time, my dear wife Faria, who mostly did the same, and our moms and dads (Nora, Razia, Paul, and Hamid), who contributed hours of babysitting, tasty meals, and general help around the house that kept this book on track. So thanks everyone—without you half of the book would still be trapped inside my brain! —Matthew MacDonald

The Missing Manual Series Missing Manuals are witty, superbly written guides to computer products that don’t come with printed manuals (which is just about all of them). Each book features a handcrafted index; cross-references to specific page numbers (not just “see Chapter 14”); and RepKover, a detached-spine binding that lets the book lie perfectly flat without the assistance of weights or cinder blocks. Recent and upcoming titles include: Access 2007: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald AppleScript: The Missing Manual by Adam Goldstein AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual by Jim Elferdink and David Reynolds CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald David Pogue’s Digital Photography: The Missing Manual by David Pogue Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland

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The Missing Credits

Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland eBay: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner Excel 2003: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald Excel 2007: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald Facebook: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer FileMaker Pro 8: The Missing Manual by Geoff Coffey and Susan Prosser FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual by Geoff Coffey and Susan Prosser Flash 8: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer Flash CS3: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer and Chris Grover Flash CS4: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover with E.A. Vander Veer FrontPage 2003: The Missing Manual by Jessica Mantaro Google Apps: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover The Internet: The Missing Manual by David Pogue and J.D. Biersdorfer iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iMovie ’08 & iDVD: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iPhone: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iPhoto ’08: The Missing Manual by David Pogue iPhoto ’09: The Missing Manual by David Pogue and J.D. Biersdorfer iPod: The Missing Manual, 6th Edition by J.D. Biersdorfer iWork ’09: The Missing Manual by Josh Clark JavaScript: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland Living Green: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition by David Pogue Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition by David Pogue Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore Netbooks: The Missing Manual by J.D. Biersdorfer Office 2004 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual by Mark H. Walker and Franklin Tessler Office 2007: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover, Matthew MacDonald, and E.A. Vander Veer

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The Missing Credits

Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual by Jim Elferdink PCs: The Missing Manual by Andy Rathbone Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual by Lesa Snider Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer QuickBase: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner QuickBooks 2008: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore Quicken 2008: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore Quicken 2009: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore QuickBooks 2009: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition by David Pogue and Adam Goldstein Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition by David Pogue Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David Pogue Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David Pogue, Craig Zacker, and Linda Zacker Windows Vista: The Missing Manual by David Pogue Windows Vista for Starters: The Missing Manual by David Pogue Word 2007: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover Your Body: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald Your Brain: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald

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Introduction

M

ost people don’t need much convincing to use Excel, Microsoft’s premier spreadsheet software. Its overwhelming popularity, especially in the business world, makes it the obvious choice for millions of number crunchers. But despite its wide use, few people know where to find Excel’s most impressive features or why they’d want to use them in the first place. Excel 2010: The Missing Manual fills that void, explaining everything from basic Excel concepts to the fancy tricks of the trade. This book not only teaches you how Excel works, but also shows you how to use Excel’s tools to answer real-world questions like “How many workdays are there between today and my vacation?”, “How much money do I need in the bank right now to retire a millionaire?”, and “Statistically speaking, who’s smarter—Democrats or Republicans?” Best of all, you’ll steer clear of obscure options that aren’t worth the trouble to learn, while homing in on the hidden gems that will win you the undying adoration of your coworkers, your family, and your friends—or at least your accountant. Note: This book is written with Microsoft’s latest and greatest release in mind: Excel 2010. This book isn’t the best choice if you’re using an earlier version of Excel, because Microsoft is continually changing Excel’s user interface (the “look and feel” of the program). To get the right instructions, look for a previous edition of this book, such as Excel 2007: The Missing Manual or Excel 2003: The Missing Manual.

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Introduction

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Is That 2,010 or 2010? What do Excel’s version numbers mean? Most people realize that the “2010” in Excel 2010 indicates the year, not the 2,010th release of the software. Microsoft’s on-again, off-again naming policy is to leave the actual version number out of product names. So what version is Excel 2010? If you dig around a little, you’ll discover that Excel 2010 is actually Excel Version 14. But even this version number

doesn’t mean what you might expect. Excel 14 is actually the eleventh release of Excel for Windows. The first version of Excel was a Macintosh-only release. There is no Excel 6, because Microsoft felt the changes they made were so great they were entitled to jump up two version numbers at once. (As questionable as that sounds, it’s a technique nearly all software makers use at some point.) And Excel 13 is also missing in action, due to superstitions about the bad-luck number 13.

What You Can Do with Excel Excel and Word are the two powerhouses of the Microsoft Office family. While Word lets you create and edit documents, Excel specializes in letting you create, edit, and analyze data that’s organized into lists or tables. This grid-like arrangement of information is called a spreadsheet. Figure I-1 shows an example. Figure I-1: This spreadsheet lists nine students, each of whom has two test scores and an assignment grade. Using Excel formulas, it’s easy to calculate the final grade for each student. And with a little more effort, you can calculate averages and medians, and determine each student’s percentile. Chapter 8 looks at how to perform these calculations.

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Introduction

Note: Excel shines when it comes to numerical data, but the program doesn’t limit you to calculations. While it has the computing muscle to analyze stacks of numbers, it’s equally useful for keeping track of the DVDs in your personal movie collection.

Some common spreadsheets include: • Business documents like financial statements, invoices, expense reports, and earnings statements. • Personal documents like weekly budgets, catalogs of your Star Wars action figures, exercise logs, and shopping lists. • Scientific data like experimental observations, models, and medical charts. These examples just scratch the surface. Resourceful spreadsheet gurus use Excel to build everything from cross-country trip itineraries to logs of every Kevin Bacon movie they’ve ever seen. Of course, Excel really shines in its ability to help you analyze a spreadsheet’s data. For example, once you’ve entered a list of household expenses, you can start crunching numbers with Excel’s slick formula tools. Before long you’ll have totals, subtotals, monthly averages, a complete breakdown of cost by category, and maybe even some predictions for the future. Excel can help track your investments and tell you how long until you’ll have saved enough to buy that weekend house in Vegas. The bottom line is that once you enter raw information, Excel’s built-in smarts can help compute all kinds of useful figures. Figure I-2 shows a sophisticated spreadsheet that has been configured to help identify hot-selling product categories. Note: Keen eyes will notice that neither of these examples (Figures I-1 and I-2) include the omnipresent Excel ribbon, which usually sits atop the window, stacked with buttons. That’s because it’s been collapsed neatly out of the way to let you focus on the spreadsheet. You’ll learn how to use this trick yourself on page 30.

Excel is not just a math wizard. If you want to add a little life to your data, you can inject color, apply exotic fonts, and even create macros (automated sequences of steps) to help speed up repetitive formatting or editing chores. And if you’re bleary-eyed from staring at rows and rows of spreadsheet numbers, you can use Excel’s many chart-making tools to build everything from 3-D pie charts to more exotic scatter graphs. (See Chapter 17 to learn about all of Excel’s chart types.) Excel can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want it to be.

Introduction

3

Introduction

Figure I-2: This spreadsheet summarizes a company’s total sales. The information is grouped based on where the company’s customers live, and it’s further divided according to product category. Summaries like these can help you spot profitable product categories and identify items popular in specific cities. This advanced example uses pivot tables, which are described in Chapter 22.

The Modern Face of Excel Although Microsoft is reluctant to admit it, most of Excel’s core features were completed nearly 10 years ago. So what has Microsoft been doing ever since? The answer, at least in part, is spending millions of dollars on usability tests, which are aimed at figuring out how easy—or difficult—a program is to use. In a typical usability test, Microsoft gathers a group of spreadsheet novices, watches them fumble around with the latest version of Excel, and then tweaks the program to make it more intuitive. After producing Excel 2003, Microsoft finally decided that minor tune-ups couldn’t fix Excel’s overly complex, button-heavy toolbars. So they decided to undertake a radical redesign to create a user interface that actually makes sense. The centerpiece of this redesign is the super-toolbar called the ribbon.

The Ribbon Everything you’ll ever want to do in Excel—from picking a fancy background color to pulling information out of a database—is packed into the ribbon. To accommodate all these buttons without becoming an over-stuffed turkey, the ribbon uses tabs. Excel starts out with seven tabs in the ribbon. When you click one of these tabs, you see a whole new collection of buttons (Figure I-3).

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Introduction

Note: Wondering what each tab holds? You’ll take a tab tour in Chapter 1 on page 29.

The ribbon is the best thing to hit the Excel scene in years. The ribbon makes it easier to find features and remember where they are, because each feature is grouped into a logically related tab. Even better, once you find the button you need, you can often find other, associated commands by looking at the section where the button is placed. In other words, the ribbon isn’t just a convenient tool—it’s also a great way to explore Excel. Figure I-3: When you launch Excel, you start at the Home tab. But here’s what happens when you click the Page Layout tab. Now, you have a slew of options for tasks like adjusting paper size and making a decent printout. The buttons in a tab are grouped into smaller boxes for clearer organization.

The ribbon is full of craftsman-like detail. For example, when you hover over a button, you don’t see a paltry two- or three-word description in a yellow box. Instead, you see a friendly pop-up box with a complete mini-description and a shortcut that lets you trigger this command from the keyboard. Another nice detail is the way you can jump through the tabs at high velocity by positioning the mouse pointer over the ribbon and rolling the scroll wheel (if your mouse has a scroll wheel). And you’re sure to notice the way the ribbon rearranges itself when you change the size of the Excel window (see Figure I-4).

Using the Ribbon with the Keyboard If you’re an unredeemed keyboard lover, you’ll be happy to hear that you can trigger ribbon commands with the keyboard. The trick is using keyboard accelerators, a series of keystrokes that starts with the Alt key (the same key you used to use to get to a menu). When using a keyboard accelerator, you don’t hold down all the keys at the same time. (As you’ll soon see, some of these keystrokes contain so many letters that you’d be playing Finger Twister if you tried holding them all down simultaneously.) Instead, you hit the keys one after the other.

Introduction

5

Introduction

Figure I-4: Top: A large Excel window gives you plenty of room to play. The ribbon uses the space effectively, making the most important buttons bigger. Bottom: When you shrink the Excel window, the ribbon rearranges its buttons and makes some smaller (by shrinking the button’s icon or leaving out the title). Shrink small enough, and you might run out of space for a section altogether. In that case, you get a single button (like the Number, Styles, and Cells sections in this example) for an entire section. Click this button and the missing commands appear in a dropdown panel.

The trick to using keyboard accelerators is to understand that once you hit the Alt key, there are two things you do, in this order: 1. Pick the ribbon tab you want. 2. Choose a command in that tab. Before you can trigger a specific command, you must select the correct tab (even if it’s already displayed). Every accelerator requires at least two key presses after you hit the Alt key. You need even more if you need to dig through a submenu. By now, this whole process probably seems hopelessly impractical. Are you really expected to memorize dozens of different accelerator key combinations? Fortunately, Excel is ready to help you out with a feature called KeyTips. Here’s how it works. Once you press the Alt key, letters magically appear over every tab in the ribbon. Once you hit a key to pick a tab, letters appear over every button in that tab (Figure I-5). You can then press the corresponding key to trigger the command (Figure I-6).

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Figure I-5: When you press Alt, Excel helps you out with KeyTips next to every tab, over the File menu, and over the buttons in the Quick Access toolbar. If you follow up with M (for the Formulas tab), you’ll see letters next to every command in that tab, as shown in Figure I-6.

Figure I-6: You can now follow up with F to trigger the Insert Function button, U to get to the AutoSum feature, and so on. Don’t bother trying to match letters with tab or button names—there are so many features packed into the ribbon that in many cases the letters don’t mean anything at all.

In some cases, a command might have two letters, in which case you need to press both keys, one after the other. (For example, the Find & Select button on the Home tab has the letters FD. To trigger it, press Alt, then H, then F, and then D.) Tip: You can back out of KeyTips mode without triggering a command at any time by pressing the Alt key again.

There are other shortcut keys that don’t use the ribbon. These are key combinations that start with the Ctrl key. For example, Ctrl+C copies highlighted text and Ctrl+S saves your work. Usually, you find out about a shortcut key by hovering over a command with the mouse. For example, hover over the Paste button in the ribbon’s Home tab, and you see a tooltip that tells you its timesaving shortcut key is Ctrl+V. And if you’ve worked with a previous version of Excel, you’ll find that Excel 2010 keeps all of the same shortcut keys. Introduction

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Introduction

NOSTALGIA CORNER

Excel 2003 Menu Shortcuts If you’ve worked with a previous version of Excel, you might have trained yourself to use menu shortcuts—key combinations that open a menu and pick out the command you want. For example, if you press Alt+E in Excel 2003, the Edit menu pops open. You can then press the S key to choose the Paste Special command. At first glance, it doesn’t look like these keyboard shortcuts will amount to much in Excel 2010. After all, Excel 2010 doesn’t even have a corresponding series of menus! Fortunately, Microsoft went to a little extra trouble to make life easier for longtime Excel aficionados. The result is that you can still use your menu shortcuts, but they work in a slightly different way.

When you hit Alt+E in Excel 2010, you see a tooltip appear over the top of the ribbon (Figure I-7) that lets you know you’ve started to enter an Excel 2003 menu shortcut. If you go on to press S, you wind up at the familiar Paste Special dialog box, because Excel knows what you’re trying to do. It’s almost as though Excel has an invisible menu at work behind the scenes. Of course, this feature can’t help you out all the time. It doesn’t work if you’re trying to use one of the few commands that don’t exist any longer. And if you need to see the menu to remember what key to press next, you’re out of luck. All Excel gives you is the tooltip.

Figure I-7: By pressing Alt+E, you’ve triggered the “imaginary” Edit menu from Excel 2003 and earlier versions. You can’t actually see it (because in Excel 2010 this menu doesn’t exist). However, the tooltip lets you know that Excel is paying attention. You can now complete your action by pressing the next key for the menu command you’re nostalgic for.

Backstage View Excel 2010 doesn’t introduce anything earth-shattering as the ribbon. However, it does have another not-so-small change to the way the program operates. Instead of sending you to an ordinary menu to open files, create them, and print your work, it devotes the entire window to these tasks—once you switch into a mode called backstage view.

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To switch to backstage view, click the File button that appears just to the left of the Home tab in the ribbon. (The name of this button is a nod to Excel 2003 and other older, more traditional Windows programs, which group many of these tasks together in a menu named File.) To get out of backstage view, just click File again or press the Esc key. Backstage view is split into two parts. On the left is a narrow strip of different commands. You click one of these to show a page for a different task. Depending on what you click, Excel may show additional options and information on the right, as shown in Figure I-8.

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Figure I-8: To create a new Excel workbook, start by clicking the File tab (1) and then the New command on the left (2). Excel uses its big backstage view to show you a slew of options. For a no-fuss blank workbook, just leave “Blank workbook” selected and click the Create button on the right (3). Or, if you want to get a head start with a premade template, choose one of the many other options underneath. (Chapter 16 tackles templates in detail.)

Here are some of the things you’ll do in Excel’s backstage view: • Work with files (creating, opening, closing, and saving them). You’ll do plenty of this in Chapter 1. • Print your work (Chapter 7) and send it off to other people by email (Chapter 25). • Prepare a workbook to be shared with other people. For example, you can check its compatibility with old versions of Excel (Chapter 1) and use document protection to prevent other people from changing your numbers (Chapter 24). • Configure how Excel behaves. Once you’re in backstage view, just click the Options command to get to the Excel Options dialog box, an all-in-one place for configuring Excel (page 37).

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Introduction

The Quick Access Toolbar Keen eyes will have noticed the tiny bit of screen real estate on the right side of the Office button, just above the ribbon. It holds a series of tiny icons, like the toolbars in older versions of Excel (Figure I-9). This is the Quick Access toolbar (or QAT, to Excel nerds). Figure I-9: The Quick Access toolbar puts the Save, Undo, and Redo command right at your fingertips. These commands are singled out because most people use them more frequently than any other commands. But as you’ll learn in the Appendix, you can add anything you want here.

If the Quick Access toolbar were nothing but a specialized shortcut for three commands, it wouldn’t be worth the bother. However, the nifty thing about the Quick Access toolbar is that you can customize it. In other words, you can remove commands you don’t use and add your own favorites. The appendix of this book shows how. Microsoft has deliberately kept the Quick Access toolbar very small. It’s designed to provide a carefully controlled outlet for those customization urges. Even if you go wild stocking the Quick Access toolbar with your own commands, the rest of the ribbon remains unchanged. (And that means a co-worker or spouse can still use your computer without suffering a migraine.)

Excel’s New Features As you’ve already learned, Excel 2010 isn’t nearly as radical as Excel 2007, which revamped the program’s main window and introduced the now-infamous ribbon. However, Excel 2010 still has its share of enhancements. Here are the most important: • Backstage view. Now Excel has a single go-to place for managing files. Whether you need to open an existing spreadsheet, create a new one, print your work, or tune up Excel options, Excel’s backstage view gives you a bit more breathing room. You’ll learn more about this mega-timesaver in Chapter 1.

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• Better AutoRecover. Excel has always had an emergency failsafe feature that preserves your work in the event of computer disaster (for example, a power failure). But now you can use the same feature to rescue your work after a personal blunder (for example, forgetting to save your work or suddenly realizing you deleted a critical piece of information 40 minutes ago). That’s because Excel 2010 stores a list of automatically backed-up files and lets you open them if you need to make an emergency recovery (page 82). • Paste preview. Now you can see what the result of a copy-and-paste will be before you actually do it. It seems like a minor refinement, but when you’re using advanced paste options—for example, trying to decide whether to copy your numbers and their formatting—it’s a huge convenience. Page 106 has more. • Sparklines. These miniature graphs are the hottest innovation in data display since the invention of the pie chart. They’re small (so they can fit into a single cell), but still big enough for you to see trends and summaries at a glance. If a full-fledged chart seems like overkill in your spreadsheet, a sparkline just might be what you’re looking for. Chapter 20 describes sparklines in detail. • Protected view. Do you live in fear of marauding Excel viruses corrupting your computer? Well, even if you don’t, you’ll be happy to know that Excel opens potentially dangerous spreadsheets in a carefully restricted window, ensuring they can’t get up to any trouble. Thanks to this change, you can open a spreadsheet straight from the Web or your email inbox, without worry. Page 57 shows how it works. • Slicers. If you’ve ever run into Excel’s pivot tables, you know that they’re powerful but complicated. But life gets a bit easier with slicers (page 645), a new feature that gives you a visual way to slice and dice your pivot table data, filtering it down to the details that interest you the most. • Easier ribbon customization. In Excel 2007, you couldn’t change the ribbon unless you mastered an intimidating extensibility model based on XML. Now, you just need a leisurely trip to the Customize Ribbon section of the Excel Options dialog box, where you can add, remove, and reorder Excel’s panoply of buttons to suit your personal preferences. The Appendix shows you how. • The Excel Web App. Wouldn’t it be cool to view your Excel spreadsheet in a web browser? And wouldn’t it be even better if you could edit it and share with other people? And wouldn’t it be just a little mind-blowing if you could use the Excel Web App to work on an Excel spreadsheet, even if you didn’t have Excel installed on your computer? For the first time, Excel 2010 makes these scenarios possible. You’ll get the scoop in Chapter 26. Of course, this list is by no means complete. Excel 2010 is chock-full of refinements, tweaks, and tune-ups that make it easier to use than any previous version. You’ll learn all the best tricks throughout this book.

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Introduction

About This Book Despite the many improvements in software over the years, one feature hasn’t improved a bit: Microsoft’s documentation. In fact, with Office 2010, you get no printed user guide at all. To learn about the thousands of features included in this software collection, Microsoft expects you to read the online help. Occasionally, the online help is actually helpful, like when you’re looking for a quick description explaining a mysterious new function. On the other hand, if you’re trying to learn how to, say, create an attractive chart, you’re stuck with terse and occasionally cryptic instructions. The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied Excel 2010. In these pages, you’ll find step-by-step instructions and tips for using almost every Excel feature, including those you may not even know exist.

About the Outline This book is divided into eight parts, each containing several chapters. • Part One: Worksheet Basics. In this part, you’ll get acquainted with Excel’s interface and learn the basic techniques for creating spreadsheets and entering and organizing data. You’ll also learn how to format your work to make it more presentable, and how to create sharp printouts. • Part Two: Formulas and Functions. This part introduces you to Excel’s most important feature—formulas. You’ll learn how to perform calculations ranging from the simple to the complex, and you’ll tackle specialized functions for dealing with all kinds of information, including scientific, statistical, business, and financial data. • Part Three: Organizing Your Information. The third part covers how to organize and find what’s in your spreadsheet. First, you’ll learn to search, sort, and filter large amounts of information by using tables. Next, you’ll see how to boil down complex tables with grouping and outlining. Finally, you’ll turn your perfected spreadsheets into reusable templates. • Part Four: Charts and Graphics. The fourth part introduces you to charting and graphics, two of Excel’s most popular features. You’ll learn about the wide range of different chart types available and when it makes sense to use each one. You’ll also find out how you can use pictures to add a little pizazz to your spreadsheets. • Part Five: Advanced Data Analysis. In this short part, you’ll tackle some of the more advanced features that people often overlook or misunderstand. You’ll see how to study different possibilities with scenarios, use goal seeking and the Solver add-in to calculate “backward” and fill in missing numbers, and create multi-layered summary reports with pivot tables.

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• Part Six: Sharing Data with the Rest of the World. The sixth part explores ways that you can share your spreadsheets with other people. You’ll learn how to collaborate with colleagues to revise a spreadsheet, without letting mistakes creep in or losing track of who did what. You’ll also learn how to copy Excel tables and charts into other programs (like Word) and how to use the Excel Web App to share and edit spreadsheet on the Web. • Part Seven: Programming Excel. This part presents a gentle introduction to the world of Excel programming, first by recording macros and then by using the full-featured VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) language, which lets you automate complex tasks. • Part Eight: Appendix. The end of this book wraps up with an appendix that shows how to customize the ribbon to get easy access to your favorite commands.

About➝These➝Arrows Throughout this book, you’ll find sentences like this one: “Choose Insert➝ Illustrations➝Picture.” This a shorthand way of telling you how to find a feature in the Excel ribbon. It translates to the following instructions: “Click the Insert tab of the toolbar. On the tab, look for the Illustrations section. In the Illustrations box, click the Picture button.” Figure I-10 shows the button you want. Figure I-10: In this book, arrow notations help to simplify ribbon commands. For example, “Choose Insert➝ Illustrations➝Picture” leads to the highlighted button shown here.

Note: As you saw back in Figure I-4, the ribbon adapts itself to different screen sizes. Depending on the size of your Excel window, it’s possible that the button you need to click won’t include any text. Instead, it shows up as a small icon. In this situation, you can hover over the mystery button to see its name before deciding whether to click it.

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Introduction

Contextual tabs There are some tabs that appear in the ribbon only when you’re working on specific tasks. For example, when you create a chart, a Chart Tools section appears with three new tabs (see Figure I-11). Figure I-11: Excel doesn’t bother to show these three tabs unless you’re working on a chart, because it’s frustrating to look at a bunch of buttons you can’t use. This sort of tab, which appears only when needed, is called a contextual tab.

When dealing with contextual tabs, the instructions in this book always include the title of the tab section (it’s Chart Tools in Figure I-11). Here’s an example: “Choose Chart Tools | Design➝Type➝Change Chart Type.” Notice that the first part of this instruction includes the tab section title (Chart Tools) and the tab name (Design), separated by the | character. That way, you can’t mistake the Chart Tools | Design tab for a Design tab in some other group of contextual tabs. Buttons with menus From time to time, you’ll encounter buttons in the ribbon that have short menus attached to them. Depending on the button, this menu might appear as soon as you click the button, or it might appear only if you click the button’s drop-down arrow, as shown in Figure I-12. When dealing with this sort of button, the last step of the instructions in this book tells you what to choose from the drop-down menu. For example, say you’re directed to “Home➝Clipboard➝Paste➝Paste Special.” That tells you to select the Home tab, look for the Clipboard section, click the drop-down part of the Paste button (to reveal the menu with extra options), and then choose Paste Special from the menu.

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Figure I-12: There are several options for pasting text from the clipboard. Click the top part of the Paste button to perform a plainvanilla paste (with all the standard settings), or click the bottom part to see the menu of choices shown here.

Tip: Be on the lookout for drop-down arrows in the ribbon—they’re tricky at first. You need to click the arrow part of the button to see the full list of options. When you click the other part of the button, you don’t see the list. Instead, Excel fires off the standard command (the one Excel thinks is the most common choice) or the command you used most recently.

Dialog box launchers As powerful as the ribbon is, you can’t do everything using the buttons it provides. Sometimes you need to use a good ol’-fashioned dialog box. (A dialog box is a term used in the Windows world to describe a small window with a limited number of options. Usually, dialog boxes are designed for one task and aren’t resizable, although software companies like Microsoft break these rules all the time.) There are two ways to get to a dialog box in Excel 2010. First, some ribbon buttons take you there straight away. For example, if you choose Home➝Clipboard➝Paste➝Paste Special, you always get a dialog box. There’s no way around it. The second way to get to a dialog box is through something called a dialog box launcher, which is just a nerdified name for the tiny square-with-arrow icon that sometimes appears in the bottom-right corner of a section of the ribbon. The easiest way to learn how to spot a dialog box launcher is to look at Figure I-13.

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Figure I-13: As you can see here, the Clipboard, Font, Alignment, and Number sections all have dialog box launchers. The Styles, Cells, and Editing sections don’t.

Dialog launchers

When you click a dialog box launcher, the related dialog box appears. For example, click the dialog box launcher for the Font section and you get a full Font dialog box that lets you scroll through all the typefaces on your computer, choose the size and color, and so on. In this book, there’s no special code word that tells you to use a dialog box launcher. Instead, you’ll see an instruction like this: “To see more font options, look at the Home➝Font section and click the dialog box launcher (the small icon in the bottomright corner).” Now that you know what a dialog box launcher is, that makes perfect sense. Backstage view If you see an instruction that includes arrows but starts with the word File, it’s telling you to go to Excel’s backstage view. For example, the sentence “Choose File➝New” means click the File button to switch to backstage view, then click the New command (which appears in the narrow list on the left). To take another look at backstage view and the list of commands it offers, jump back to Figure I-8 on page 9. Ordinary menus There are also a couple of cases where you’ll still use the familiar Windows menu. One example is when you use the Visual Basic editor (in Chapter 29). In this case, the arrows refer to menu levels. For example the instruction “Choose File➝Save” means “Click the File menu heading. Then, on the File menu, click the Save command.”

About Shortcut Keys Every time you take your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse, you lose a few microseconds. That’s why many experienced computer fans use keystroke combinations instead of toolbars and menus wherever possible. Ctrl+S, for example, is a keyboard shortcut that saves your current work in Excel (and most other programs). 16

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When you see a shortcut like Ctrl+S in this book, it’s telling you to hold down the Ctrl key and, while it’s down, press the letter S, and then release both keys. Similarly, the finger-tangling shortcut Ctrl+Alt+S means hold down Ctrl, and then press and hold Alt, and then press S (so that all three keys are held down at once).

Examples As you read this book, you’ll see a number of examples that demonstrate Excel features and techniques for building good spreadsheets. Most of these examples are available as Excel workbook files in a separate download. Just surf to www. missingmanuals.com/cds and click the link for this book to visit a page where you can download a ZIP file that includes the examples, organized by chapter.

About MissingManuals.com At http://www.missingmanuals.com, you’ll find news, articles, and updates to the books in the Missing Manual series. But the website also offers corrections and updates to this book (to see them, click the book’s title, and then click Errata). In fact, you’re invited and encouraged to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We’ll also note such changes on the website, so that you can mark important corrections in your own copy of the book. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your own suggestions for new books in the Missing Manual series. There’s a place for that on the website, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.

Safari® Books Online Safari® Books Online is an on-demand digital library that lets you easily search over 7,500 technology and creative reference books and videos to find the answers you need quickly. With a subscription, you can read any page and watch any video from our library online. Read books on your cellphone and mobile devices. Access new titles before they’re available for print, and get exclusive access to manuscripts in development and post feedback for the authors. Copy and paste code samples, organize your favorites, download chapters, bookmark key sections, create notes, print out pages, and benefit from tons of other time-saving features. O’Reilly Media has uploaded this book to the Safari Books Online service. To have full digital access to this book and others on similar topics from O’Reilly and other publishers, sign up for free at http://my.safaribooksonline.com.

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Creating Your First Spreadsheet

E

very Excel grandmaster needs to start somewhere. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create a basic spreadsheet. First, you’ll learn to move around Excel’s grid of cells, typing in numbers and text as you go. Next, you’ll take a quick tour of the Excel window, stopping to meet the different tabs in the ribbon and take a quick peek at the formula bar. Finally, you’ll get a tour of Excel’s innovative backstage view—the file-management hub where you can save your work for posterity, open recent files, and tweak Excel options. Note: Even if you’re an Excel old-timer, don’t bypass this chapter. Although you already know how to fill in a simple spreadsheet, you haven’t seen Excel’s backstage view, which is a completely new feature in Excel 2010. It gives you a single, streamlined place to perform a whole variety of tasks, most of which have to do with managing your files. To skip the review and pick up your backstage pass, jump straight to page 36.

Creating a Basic Worksheet When you first launch Excel, it starts you off with a new, blank worksheet, as shown in Figure 1-1. A worksheet is the grid of cells where you type your information and formulas. This grid takes up most of the Excel window. It’s where you’ll perform all your work, such as entering data, writing formulas, and reviewing the results. Here are a few basics about Excel’s grid: • The grid divides your worksheet into rows and columns. Columns are identified with letters (A, B, C…), while rows are identified with numbers (1, 2, 3…).

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• The smallest unit in your worksheet is the cell. Cells are identified by column and row. For example, C6 is the address of a cell in column C (the third column) and row 6 (the sixth row). Figure 1-2 shows this cell, which looks like a rectangular box. Incidentally, an Excel cell can hold up to 32,000 characters. • A worksheet can span an eye-popping 16,000 columns and 1 million rows. In the unlikely case that you want to go beyond those limits—say, if you’re tracking blades of grass on the White House lawn—you’ll need to create a new worksheet. Every spreadsheet file can hold a virtually unlimited number of worksheets, as you’ll learn in Chapter 4. • When you enter information, enter it one cell at a time. However, you don’t have to follow any set order. For example, you can start by typing information into cell A40 without worrying about filling any data in the cells that appear in the earlier rows. Quick Access toolbar

Status bar Your spreadsheet work area

Ribbon

Figure 1-1: The largest part of the Excel window is the worksheet grid, where you type in your information.

Formula bar

Note: Obviously, once you go beyond 26 columns, you run out of letters. Excel handles this by doubling up (and then tripling up) letters. For example, column Z is followed by column AA, then AB, then AC, all the way to AZ and then BA, BB, BC—you get the picture. And if you create a ridiculously large worksheet, you’ll find that column ZZ is followed by AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on.

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Active cell address

Current row

Current column

Figure 1-2: Here, the current cell is C6. You can recognize the current (or active) cell based on its heavy black border. You’ll also notice that the corresponding column letter (C) and row number (6) are highlighted at the edges of the worksheet. Just above the worksheet, on the left side of the window, the formula bar tells you the active cell address.

The best way to get a feel for Excel is to dive right in and start putting together a worksheet. The following sections cover each step that goes into assembling a simple worksheet. This one tracks household expenses, but you can use the same approach to create any basic worksheet.

Starting a New Workbook When you fire up Excel, it opens a fresh workbook file. If you’ve already got Excel open and you want to create another workbook, just choose File➝New (where File switches you into Excel’s backstage view, and New is a command on the left side of the window). You’ll see a variety of options for creating specialized types of spreadsheets. But to get started with a blank canvas, keep “Blank workbook” selected and click the Create button, as shown in Figure 1-3. Note: A workbook is a collection of one or more worksheets. That distinction isn’t terribly important now because you’re using only a single worksheet in each workbook you create. But in Chapter 4, you’ll learn how to use several worksheets in the same workbook to track related collections of data. For now, all you need to know is that the worksheet is the grid of cells where you place your data, and the workbook is the spreadsheet file that you save on your computer.

You don’t need to pick the file name for your workbook when you first create it. Instead, that decision happens later, when you save your workbook. For now, you start with a blank canvas that’s ready to receive your numerical insights. Note: Creating new workbooks doesn’t disturb what you’ve already done. Whatever workbook you were using remains open in another window. You can use the taskbar to move from one workbook to the other, or you can use the Excel shortcuts explained on page 60. chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Figure 1-3: Excel lets you create a new, blank workbook or a ready-made workbook from a template. For now, choose “Blank workbook” and then click the big Create button in the bottomright corner. You’ll learn about using (and making) templates in Chapter 16.

Adding the Column Titles Excel allows you to arrange information in whatever way you like. There’s nothing to stop you from scattering numbers left and right, across as many cells as you can. However, one of the most common (and most useful) ways to arrange your information is as a table, with headings for each column. It’s important to remember that even for the simplest worksheet, the decisions you make about what’s going to go in each column can have a big effect on how easy it is to manipulate your information. For example, in a worksheet that stores a mailing list, you could have two columns: one for names and another for addresses. But if you create more than two columns, your life will probably be easier since you can separate first names from street addresses from ZIP codes, and so on. Figure 1-4 shows the difference. You can, of course, always add or remove columns later. But you can avoid getting gray hairs by starting a worksheet with all the columns you think you’ll need. The first step in creating your worksheet is to add your headings in the row of cells at the top of the worksheet (row 1). Technically, you don’t need to start right in the first row, but unless you want to add more information before your table—like a title for the chart or today’s date—there’s no point in wasting the space. Adding information is easy—just click the cell you want and start typing. When you’re finished, hit Tab to complete your entry and move to the next cell to the right (or Enter to head to the cell just underneath).

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Figure 1-4: Top: If you enter the first and last names together in one column, Excel can sort only by the first names. And if you clump the addresses and ZIP codes together, you give Excel no way to count how many people live in a certain town or neighborhood, because Excel can’t extract the ZIP codes. Bottom: The benefit of a six-column table is significant: It lets you sort (reorganize) your list according to people’s last names or where they live. It also allows you to filter out individual bits of information when you start using functions later in this book.

Note: The information you put in an Excel worksheet doesn’t need to be in neat, ordered columns. Nothing stops you from scattering numbers and text in random cells. However, most Excel worksheets resemble some sort of table, because that’s the easiest and most effective way to deal with large amounts of structured information.

For a simple expense worksheet designed to keep a record of your most prudent and extravagant purchases, try the following three headings: • Date Purchased stores the date when you spent the money. • Item stores the name of the product that you bought. • Price records how much it cost. Right away, you face your first glitch: awkwardly crowded text. Figure 1-5 shows how you can adjust column width for proper breathing room.

chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Figure 1-5: Top: The standard width of an Excel column is 8.43 characters, which hardly allows you to get a word in edgewise. To solve this problem, position your mouse on the right border of the column header you want to expand so that the mouse pointer changes to the resize icon (it looks like a double-headed arrow). Now drag the column border to the right as far as you want. As you drag, a tooltip appears, telling you the character size and pixel width of the column. Both of these pieces of information play the same role— they tell you how wide the column is—only the unit of measurement changes. Bottom: When you release the mouse, the entire column of cells is resized to the new size.

Note: A column’s character width doesn’t really reflect how many characters (or letters) fit in a cell. Excel uses proportional fonts, in which different letters take up different amounts of room. For example, the letter W is typically much wider than the letter 1. All this means is that the character width Excel shows you isn’t a real indication of how many letters can fit in the column, but it’s still a useful measurement that you can use to compare different columns.

Adding Data You can now begin adding your data: simply fill in the rows under the column titles. Each row in the expense worksheet represents a separate purchase you’ve made. (If you’re familiar with databases, you can think of each row as a separate record.)

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As Figure 1-6 shows, the first column is for dates, the second column is for text, and the third column holds numbers. Keep in mind that Excel doesn’t impose any rules on what you type, so you’re free to put text in the Price column. But if you don’t keep a consistent kind of data in each column, you won’t be able to easily analyze (or understand) your information later. Figure 1-6: This rudimentary expense list has three items (in rows 2, 3, and 4). The alignment of each column reflects the data type (by default, numbers and dates are right-aligned, while text is left-aligned), indicating that Excel understands your date and price information.

That’s it. You’ve now created a living, breathing worksheet. The next section explains how you can edit the data you’ve entered.

Editing Data Every time you start typing in a cell, Excel erases any existing content in that cell. (You can also quickly remove the contents of a cell by just moving to it and pressing Delete, which clears its contents.) If you want to edit cell data instead of replacing it, you need to put the cell in edit mode, like this: 1. Move to the cell you want to edit. Use the mouse or the arrow keys to get to the correct cell. 2. Put the cell in edit mode by pressing F2. Edit mode looks almost the same as ordinary text entry mode. The only difference is that you can use the arrow keys to move through the text you’re typing and make changes. (When you aren’t in edit mode, pressing these keys just moves you to another cell.) If you don’t want to use F2, you can also get a cell into edit mode by doubleclicking it. 3. Complete your edit. Once you’ve modified the cell content, press Enter to make your change or Esc to cancel your edit and leave the old value in the cell. Alternatively, you can click on another cell to accept the current value and go somewhere else. But while you’re in edit mode, you can’t use the arrow keys to move out of the cell. chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Moving Around the Grid

Tip: If you start typing new information into a cell and you decide you want to move to an earlier position in your entry (to make an alteration, for instance), just press F2. The cell box still looks the same, but you’re now in edit mode, which means that you can use the arrow keys to move within the cell (instead of moving from cell to cell). You can press F2 again to return to the normal data entry mode, which allows you to use the arrow keys to move to another cell.

As you enter data, you may discover the Bigtime Excel Display Problem (known to aficionados as BEDP): Cells in adjacent columns can overlap one another. Figure 1-7 shows the problem. One way to fix BEDP is to manually resize the column, as shown in Figure 1-5. Another option is to use wrapping to fit multiple lines of text in a single cell, as described on page 161. Figure 1-7: Overlapping cells can create big headaches. For example, if you type a large amount of text into A1, and then you type some text into B1, you see only part of the data in A1 on your worksheet (as shown here). The rest is hidden from view. But if, say, A3 contains a large amount of text and B3 is empty, the content in A3 is displayed over both columns, and you don’t have a problem.

Moving Around the Grid Learning how to move around the Excel grid quickly and confidently is an indispensable skill. To move from cell to cell, you have two fairly obvious choices: • Use the arrow keys on the keyboard. Keystrokes move you one cell at a time in any direction. • Click the cell with the mouse. A mouse click jumps you directly to the cell you’ve clicked. As you move from cell to cell, you see the black focus box move to highlight the currently active cell. In some cases, you might want to cover ground a little quicker. One option is to use the scrollbars at the bottom and on the right side of the window to scroll off into the uncharted regions of your worksheet. Excel also provides two more powerful features— shortcut keys and the Go To feature—which are described in the following sections.

Shortcut Keys Excel provides a number of handy key combinations that can transport you across your worksheet in great leaps and bounds (see Table 1-1). The most useful shortcut keys include the Home key combinations, which bring you back to the beginning of a row or the top of your worksheet.

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Moving Around the Grid POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Using R1C1 Reference Style Most people like to identify columns with letters and rows with numbers. This system makes it easy to tell the difference between the two, and it allows you to use short cell addresses like A10, B4, H99, and so on. When you first install Excel, it uses this style of cell addressing.

can become somewhat awkward. For example, if you want to find cell AX1, it isn’t immediately obvious that this cell is in column 50. On the other hand, the R1C1 address for the same cell—R1C50—gives you a clearer idea of where to find the cell.

However, Excel also lets you use another cell addressing system called R1C1. In R1C1 style, columns and rows are both identified with numbers. That means the cell address A10 becomes R10C1 (read this as Row 10, Column 1). The letters R and C tell you which part of the address is the row and which part is the column. The order is reversed from conventional cell addressing.

To use R1C1 for a spreadsheet, select File➝Options. This shows the Excel Options window, where you can change a wide array of settings. In the list on the left, choose Formulas to hone in on the section you need. Then, look under the “Working with formulas” heading, and turn on the “R1C1 reference style” checkbox.

R1C1 addressing isn’t all that common. But it becomes useful if you need to deal with worksheets that have more than 26 columns. With normal cell addressing, Excel runs out of letters after column 26, and it starts using two letters (as in AA, AB, AC, and so on) to identify columns. This approach

R1C1 is a file-specific setting, which means that if someone sends you a spreadsheet that he saved with R1C1, you’ll see the R1C1 cell addresses when you open the file, regardless of what type of cell addressing you use in your own spreadsheets. Fortunately, you can change cell addressing at any time using the Excel Options window.

Note: Shortcut key combinations that use the + sign must be entered together. For example, “Ctrl+Home” means you hold down Ctrl and press Home at the same time. Key combinations with a comma work in sequence. For example, the key combination “End, Home” means press End first, release it, and then press Home. Table 1-1. Shortcut keys for moving around a worksheet

Key combination

Result

� (or Tab)

Moves one cell to the right.

� (or Shift+Tab)

Moves one cell to the left.

�

Moves one cell up.

� (or Enter)

Moves one cell down.

Page Up

Moves up one screen. Thus, if the grid shows 10 cells at a time, this key moves to a cell in the same column, 10 rows up (unless you are already at the top of the worksheet).

Page Down

Moves down one screen. Thus, if the grid shows 10 cells at a time, this key moves to a cell in the same column, 10 rows down.

Home

Moves to the first cell (column A) of the current row.

Ctrl+Home

Moves to the first cell in the top row, which is A1.

Ctrl+End (or End, Home)

Moves to the last column of the last occupied row. This cell is at the bottom-right edge of your data. chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Excel also lets you cross great distances in a single bound using a Ctrl+arrow key combination. These key combinations jump to the edges of your data. Edge cells include cells that are next to other blank cells. For example, if you press Ctrl+� while you’re inside a group of cells with information in them, you’ll skip to the right, over all filled cells, and stop just before the next blank cell. If you press Ctrl+� again, you’ll skip over all the nearby blank cells and land in the next cell to the right that has information in it. If there aren’t any more cells with data on the right, you’ll wind up on the very edge of your worksheet. The Ctrl+arrow key combinations are useful if you have more than one table of data in the same worksheet. For example, imagine you have two tables of data, one at the top of a worksheet and one at the bottom. If you are at the top of the first table, you can use Ctrl+� to jump to the bottom of the first table, skipping all the rows in between. Press Ctrl+� again, and you leap over all the blank rows, winding up at the beginning of the second table.

The Go To Feature If you’re fortunate enough to know exactly where you need to go, you can use the Go To feature to make the jump. Go To moves to the cell address you specify. It comes in useful in extremely large spreadsheets, where just scrolling through the worksheet takes half a day. To bring up the Go To dialog box (shown in Figure 1-8), choose Home➝Editing➝Find & Select➝Go To. Or you can do yourself a favor and just press Ctrl+G. Enter the cell address (such as C32), and then click OK. Figure 1-8: You’ll notice that in the Go To list, cell addresses are written a little differently than the format you use when you type them in. Namely, dollar signs are added before the row number and column letter. Thus, C32 becomes $C$32, which is simply the convention that Excel uses for fixed cell references. (You’ll learn much more about the different types of cell references in Chapter 8.)

The Go To feature becomes more useful the more you use it. That’s because the Go To window maintains a list of the most recent cell addresses that you’ve entered. In addition, every time you open the Go To window, Excel automatically adds the current cell to the list. This feature makes it easy to jump to a far-off cell and quickly return to your starting location by selecting the last entry in the list.

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A Tour of the Excel Window

The Go To window isn’t your only option for leaping through a worksheet in a single bound. If you look at the Home➝Editing➝Find & Select menu, you’ll find more specialized commands that let you jump straight to cells that contains formulas, comments, conditional formatting, and other advanced Excel ingredients that you haven’t learned about yet. And if you want to hunt down cells that have specific text, you need the popular Find command (Home➝Editing➝Find & Select➝Find), which is covered on page 127.

A Tour of the Excel Window Finding your way around a worksheet is a fundamental part of mastering Excel. Knowing your way around the larger program window is no less important. The next few sections help you get oriented in the Excel window, pointing out the important stuff and letting you know what you can usually ignore.

The Tabs of the Ribbon In the Introduction, you learned about the ribbon, the super-toolbar that offers one-stop shopping for all of Excel’s features. All the most important Office applications—including Word, Access, PowerPoint, and Excel—use the ribbon. However, each program has a different set of tabs and buttons. Throughout this book, you’ll dig through the different tabs of the ribbon to find important features. But before you start your journey, it’s nice to get a quick overview of what each tab provides. Here’s the lowdown: • File isn’t really a toolbar tab, even though it appears first in the list. Instead, it’s your gateway to Excel’s backstage view, as described on page 36. • Home includes some of the most commonly used buttons, like those for cutting and pasting information, formatting your data, and hunting down important bits of information with search tools. You’ve already used the Go To button on this tab (see the box “Getting Somewhere in a Hurry,” on page 28). • Insert lets you add special ingredients like tables, graphics, charts, and hyperlinks. • Page Layout is all about getting your worksheet ready for the printer. You can tweak margins, paper orientation, and other page settings. • Formulas are mathematical instructions that you use to perform calculations. This tab helps you build super-smart formulas and resolve mind-bending errors. • Data lets you get information from an outside data source (like a heavy-duty database) so you can analyze it in Excel. It also includes tools for dealing with large amounts of information, like sorting, filtering, and subgrouping. • Review includes the familiar Office proofing tools (like the spell checker). It also has buttons that let you add comments to a worksheet and manage revisions.

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• View lets you switch on and off a variety of viewing options. It also lets you pull off a few fancy tricks if you want to view several separate Excel spreadsheet files at the same time. GEM IN THE ROUGH

Collapsing the Ribbon Most people are happy to have the ribbon sit at the top of the Excel window, with all its buttons on hand. However, serious number crunchers demand maximum space for their data. They’d rather look at another row of numbers than a pumped-up toolbar. If this describes you, then you’ll be happy to find out you can collapse the ribbon, which shrinks it down to a single row of tab titles, as shown in Figure 1-9. To collapse it, just double-click the current tab title. (Or, you can click the tiny up-pointing icon that appears in the top-right corner of the ribbon, right next to the help icon.) Even when the ribbon is collapsed, you can still use all its features. All you need to do is click a tab. For example, if you

click Home, the Home tab pops up over your work-sheet. As soon as you click the button you want in the Home tab (or click a cell in your worksheet), the ribbon collapses itself again. The same trick works if you trigger a command in the ribbon using the keyboard, as described on page 5. If you use the ribbon only occasionally, or if you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, it makes sense to collapse the ribbon. Even when collapsed, the ribbon commands are available—it just takes an extra click to open the tab. On the other hand, if you make frequent trips to the ribbon or you’re learning about Excel and like to browse the ribbon to see what features are available, don’t bother collapsing it. The two or three rows that you’ll lose are well worth it.

Figure 1-9: Do you want to use every square inch of screen space for your cells? You can collapse the ribbon (as shown here) by double-clicking any tab. Click a tab to pop it open temporarily, or double-click a tab to bring the ribbon back for good. And if you want to perform the same trick without raising your fingers from the keyboard, you can use the shortcut key Ctrl+F1.

Note: In some circumstances, you may see tabs that aren’t listed here. Macro programmers and other highly technical types use the Developer tab. (You’ll learn how to reveal this tab on page 817.) The Add-Ins tab appears when you’re viewing workbooks that were created in previous versions of Excel and used custom toolbars. And finally, you can create a tab of your own if you’re ambitious enough to customize the ribbon, as explained in the appendix.

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The Formula Bar The formula bar appears above the worksheet grid but below the ribbon (Figure 1-10). It displays the address of the active cell (like A1) on the left edge, and it also shows you the current cell’s contents. You can use the formula bar to enter and edit data, instead of editing directly in your worksheet. This approach is particularly useful when a cell contains a formula or a large amount of information. That’s because the formula bar gives you more work room than a typical cell. Just as with in-cell edits, you press Enter to confirm your changes or Esc to cancel them. Or you can use the mouse: When you start tying in the formula bar, a checkmark and an “X” icon appear just to the left of the box where you’re typing. Click the checkmark to confirm your entry or “X” to roll it back. Note: You can hide (or show) the formula bar by choosing View➝Show➝Formula Bar. But the formula bar is such a basic part of Excel that you’d be unwise to get rid of it. Instead, keep it around until Chapter 8, when you’ll learn how to build formulas.

Figure 1-10: The formula bar (just above the grid) shows information about the active cell. In this example, the formula bar shows that the current cell is B4 and that it contains the number 592. Instead of editing this value in the worksheet, you can click anywhere in the formula bar and make your changes there.

Ordinarily, the formula bar is a single line. If you have a really long entry in a cell (like a paragraph’s worth of text), you need to scroll from one side to the other. However, there’s another option—you can resize the formula bar so it fits more information, as shown in Figure 1-11.

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Drag here to resize the formula bar

Collapse (or expand) the formula bar Scroll the contents of the formula bar

Figure 1-11: To enlarge the formula bar, click the bottom edge and pull down. You can make it two, three, four, or many more lines large. Best of all, once you get the size you want, you can use the expand/ collapse button on the right side of the formula bar to quickly expand it to your preferred size and collapse it back to the single-line view.

The Status Bar Though people often overlook it, the status bar (Figure 1-12) is a good way to keep on top of Excel’s current state. For example, if you save or print a document, the status bar shows the progress of the printing process. If you’re performing a quick action, the progress indicator may disappear before you have a chance to even notice it. But if you’re performing a time-consuming operation—say, printing out an 87-page table of the airline silverware you happen to own—you can look to the status bar to see how things are coming along.

Status text

Record a macro

View buttons

Zoom slider

Figure 1-12: In the status bar, you can see the basic status text (which just says “Ready” in this example), the view buttons (which are useful when you’re preparing a spreadsheet for printing), and the zoom slider bar (which lets you enlarge or shrink the current worksheet view).

The status bar combines several different types of information. The leftmost part of the status bar shows the Cell Mode, which displays one of three indicators: • The word “Ready” means that Excel isn’t doing anything much at the moment, other than waiting for you to take some action. 32

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A Tour of the Excel Window

• The word “Enter” appears when you start typing a new value into a cell. • The word “Edit” means the cell is currently in edit mode, and pressing the left and right arrow keys moves through the cell data, instead of moving from cell to cell. You can place a cell in edit mode or take it out of edit mode by pressing F2. Just to the right of the Cell Mode information, you may see a small button that lets you start recording a macro. (A macro is a series of steps you can replay as often as you need to automate tiresome chores. You’ll learn more about macros in Chapter 28.) Farther to the right on the status bar are the view buttons, which let you switch to Page Layout View or Page Break Preview. These different views help you see what your worksheet will look like when you print it. They’re covered in Chapter 7. The zoom slider is next to the view buttons, at the far right edge of the status bar. You can slide it to the left to zoom out (which fits more information into your Excel window at once) or slide it to the right to zoom in (and take a closer look at fewer cells). You can learn more about zooming on page 196. In addition, the status bar displays other miscellaneous indicators. For example, if you press the Scroll Lock key, a Scroll Lock indicator appears on the status bar (next to the “Ready” text). This indicator tells you that you’re in scroll mode. In scroll mode, the arrow keys don’t move you from one cell to another; instead, they scroll the entire worksheet up, down, or to the side. Scroll mode is a great way to check out another part of your spreadsheet without leaving your current position. You can control what indicators appear in the status bar by configuring it. To see a full list of possibilities, right-click the status bar. A huge list of options appears, as shown in Figure 1-13. Table 1-2 describes the different status bar options. Note: The Caps Lock indicator doesn’t determine whether you can use the Caps Lock key—that feature always works. The Caps Lock indicator just lets you know when Caps Lock mode is on. That way you won’t be surprised by an accidental keystroke that turns your next data entry INTO ALL CAPITALS.

Table 1-2. Status bar indicators

Indicator

Meaning

Cell Mode

Shows Ready, Edit, or Enter depending on the state of the current cell.

Signatures, Information Management Policy, and Permissions

Displays information about the rights and restrictions of the current spreadsheet. These features come into play only if you’re using Office SharePoint Server to share spreadsheets among groups of people (usually in a corporate environment). SharePoint is introduced on page 746.

Caps Lock

Indicates whether Caps Lock mode is on. When Caps Lock is on, every letter you type is automatically capitalized. To turn Caps Lock mode on or off, hit Caps Lock.

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Num Lock

Indicates whether Num Lock mode is on. When this mode is on, you can use the numeric keypad (typically at the right side of your keyboard) to type in numbers more quickly. When this sign’s off, the numeric keypad controls cell navigation instead. To turn Num Lock on or off, press Num Lock.

Scroll Lock

Indicates whether Scroll Lock mode is on. When it’s on, you can use the arrow keys to scroll through the worksheet without changing the active cell. (In other words, you can control your scrollbars by just using your keyboard.) This feature lets you look at all the information you have in your worksheet without losing track of the cell you’re currently in. You can turn Scroll Lock mode on or off by pressing Scroll Lock.

Fixed Decimal

Indicates when Fixed Decimal mode is on. When this mode is on, Excel automatically adds a set number of decimal places to the values you enter in any cell. For example, if you set Excel to use two fixed decimal places and you type the number 5 into a cell, Excel actually enters 0.05. This seldom-used featured is handy for speed typists who need to enter reams of data in a fixed format. You can turn this feature on or off by selecting File®Options, choosing the Advanced section, and then looking under “Editing options” to find the “Automatically insert a decimal point” setting. Once you turn this checkbox on, you can choose the number of decimal places (the standard option is 2).

Overtype Mode

Indicates when Overwrite mode is turned on. Overwrite mode changes how cell edits work. When you edit a cell and Overwrite mode is on, the new characters that you type overwrite existing characters (rather than displacing them). You can turn Overwrite mode on or off by pressing Insert.

End Mode

Indicates that you’ve pressed End, which is the first key in many two-key combinations; the next key determines what happens. For example, hit End and then Home to move to the bottom-right cell in your worksheet. See Table 1-1 for a list of key combinations, some of which use End.

Macro Recording

Macros are automated routines that perform some task in an Excel spreadsheet. The Macro Recording indicator shows a record button (which looks like a red circle superimposed on a worksheet) that lets you start recording a new macro. You’ll learn more about macros in Chapter 28.

Selection Mode

Indicates the current Selection mode. You have two options: normal mode and extended selection. When you press the arrows keys and extended selection is on, Excel automatically selects all the rows and columns you cross. Extended selection is a useful keyboard alternative to dragging your mouse to select swaths of the grid. To turn extended selection on or off, press F8. You’ll learn more about selecting cells and moving them around in Chapter 3.

Page Number

Shows the current page and the total number of pages (as in “Page 1 of 4”). This indicator appears only in Page Layout view (as described on page 217).

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A Tour of the Excel Window

Average, Count, Numerical Count, Minimum, Maximum, Sum

Show the result of a calculation on the selected cells. For example, the Sum indicator shows the total of all the numeric cells that are currently selected. You’ll take a closer look at this handy trick on page 98.

Upload Status

Does nothing (that we know of). Excel does show a handy indicator in the status bar when you’re uploading files to the Web, as you’ll learn in Chapter 26. However, the upload status is always shown, and this setting doesn’t seem to have any effect.

View Shortcuts

Shows the three view buttons that let you switch between Normal view, Page Layout View, and Page Break Preview.

Zoom

Shows the current zoom percentage (like 100 percent for a normal-sized spreadsheet, and 200 percent for a spreadsheet that’s blown up to twice the magnification).

Zoom Slider

Shows a slider that lets you zoom in closer (by sliding it to the right) or out to see more information at once (by sliding it to the left).

Figure 1-13: Every item that has a checkmark appears in the status bar when you need it. For example, if you choose Caps Lock, the text “Caps Lock” appears in the status bar whenever you hit the Caps Lock key to switch to all-capital typing. The text that appears on the right side of the list tells you the current value of the indicator. In this example, Caps Lock mode is currently off and the Cell Mode text says “Ready.”

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Going Backstage Your data is the star of the show. That’s why the creators of Excel refer to your worksheet as being “on stage.” The auditorium is the Excel main window, which—as you’ve just seen—includes the handy ribbon, formula bar, and status bar. Sure, it’s a strange metaphor. But once you understand it, you’ll realize the rationale for Excel’s backstage view, which temporarily takes you away from your worksheet and lets you concentrate on other tasks that don’t involve entering or editing data. These tasks include saving your spreadsheet, opening more spreadsheets, printing your work, and changing Excel settings. To switch to backstage view, click the File button that’s just to the left of the Home ribbon tab. Excel temporarily tucks your worksheet out of sight (although it’s still open and waiting for you). This gives it space to show extra information related to the task you want to perform, as shown in Figure 1-14. For example, if you plan to print your spreadsheet, Excel’s backstage view has room to show a preview of the printout. Or if you want to open an existing spreadsheet, Excel can show a detailed list of files you’ve recently worked on. To get out of backstage view and return to your worksheet, just click the File button again, or press Esc. Figure 1-14: When you first switch to backstage view, Excel shows the Info page, which provides some basic information about your workbook file, its size, when it was last edited, who edited it, and so on (see the column on the far right). The Info page also provides the gateway to three important features: document protection (Chapter 24), compatibility checking (page 41), and AutoRecover backups (page 82). To go to another section, click a different command in the column on the far left.

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Saving Files

Excel Options The Excel Options window provides a central hub where you can adjust how Excel looks, behaves, and calculates (see Figure 1-15). To get to this window, choose File➝Options. The various sections in the Excel Options window let you tweak a wide variety of different details. Some of these details are truly handy, like the options for opening and saving files (which are described at the end of this chapter). Others are seldomused holdovers from the past, like the option that lets Excel act like Lotus—an ancient piece of spreadsheet software—when you hit the “/” key.

Figure 1-15: The Excel Options window is divided into 10 sections. To pick which section to look at, choose an entry from the list on the left. In this example, you’re looking at the General settings group. In each section, the settings are further subdivided into titled groups. You may need to scroll down to find the setting you want.

Tip: Some important options have a small i-in-a-circle icon next to them, which stands for “information.” Hover over this icon, and you see a tooltip that gives you a brief description about that setting.

While you’re getting to know Excel, you can comfortably ignore most of what’s in the Excel Options window. But you’ll return here many times throughout this book to adjust settings and fine-tune the way Excel works.

Saving Files As everyone who’s been alive for at least three days knows, you should save your work early and often. Excel is no exception. You have three choices for saving a spreadsheet file: chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Saving Files

• Save. This action updates the spreadsheet file with your most recent changes. If you use Save on a new file that hasn’t been saved before Excel prompts you to choose a folder and file name. To use Save, select File➝Save, or press Ctrl+S. Or look up at the top of the Excel window in the Quick Access toolbar for the tiny Save button, which looks like an old-style diskette. Tip: Resaving a spreadsheet is an almost instantaneous operation, and you should get used to doing it regularly. After you’ve made any significant change, just hit Ctrl+S to make sure you’ve stored the latest version of your data.

• Save As. This choice allows you to save your spreadsheet file with a new name. You can use Save As the first time you save a new spreadsheet, or you can use it to save a copy of your current spreadsheet with a new name, in a new folder, or as a different file type. To use Save As, select File➝Save As, or press F12. • Save & Send. The File➝Save & Send page in Excel's backstage view provides several of the same options you get from the Save As dialog box. The difference is that it makes them a bit more obvious and a bit more convenient. Figure 1-16 shows what to look for. Figure 1-16: Using File➝Save & Send, you can email a copy of your workbook (page 723), transfer it to the Excel Web App (Chapter 26), or upload it to SharePoint (page 746). But ignore these options for now and focus on the “File Types” section underneath, which gives you shortcuts for saving your work in alternative file formats. If you click Change File Type, you get a list with the most common file formats (on the right). Double-click an entry to open the Save As dialog box with that selection. Or click Create PDF/XPS Document to create a printready PDF document, as described on page 44.

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Saving Files

The Excel File Format Since time immemorial, Excel fans have been saving their lovingly crafted spreadsheets in .xls files (as in AirlineSilverware.xls). But when Excel 2007 hit the streets, it introduced a completely new file format, with the extension .xlsx (as in AirlineSilverware.xlsx). Excel 2010 keeps the .xlsx revamped format, without introducing any more changes. As an Excel user, you need to decide whether you want to save your spreadsheets in the latest and greatest .xlsx format or in the older .xls format. But before you make that decision, it helps to know a bit more about the advantages of the .xlsx format: • It’s compact. The .xlsx format uses ZIP file compression, so spreadsheet files are smaller—way smaller (as much as 75 percent smaller than their original sizes). And even though the average hard drive is already large enough to swallow thousands of old-fashioned Excel files, the new compact format is easier to email around. • It’s less error-prone. The .xlsx format carefully separates ordinary content, pictures, and macro code into separate sections. Microsoft claims that this change makes for tougher files. Now, if a part of your Excel file is damaged (for example, due to a faulty hard drive), there’s a much better chance that you can still retrieve the rest of the information. (You’ll learn about Excel disaster recovery on page 53.) • It’s extensible. The .xlsx format uses XML (the eXtensible Markup Language), which is a standardized way to store information. (You’ll learn more about XML in Chapter 23.) XML storage doesn’t benefit the average person, but it’s sure to earn a lot of love from companies that plan to build custom software that uses Excel documents. As long as Excel documents are stored in XML, these companies can create automated programs that pull the information they need straight out of a spreadsheet, without going through Excel. These programs can also generate made-to-measure Excel documents all on their own. For all these reasons, .xlsx is the format of choice for Excel 2010. However, Microsoft prefers to give people all the choices they could ever need (rather than make life really simple), and Excel file formats are no exception. In fact, the .xlsx file format actually has two additional flavors. First, there’s the closely related .xlsm cousin, which adds the ability to store macro code. If you’ve added any macros to your spreadsheet, Excel prompts you to use this file type when you save your spreadsheet. (You’ll learn about macros in Chapter 28.) Second, there’s the optimized .xlsb format, which is a specialized option that just might be faster when you’re opening and saving gargantuan spreadsheets. The .xlsb format has the same automatic compression and error-resistance as .xlsx, but it doesn’t use XML. Instead, it stores information in raw binary form (good ol’ ones and zeroes), which is speedier in some situations. To use the .xlsb format, choose File➝Save As, and then, from the “Save as type” list, choose Excel Binary Workbook (.xlsb).

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Most of the time, you don’t need to think about Excel’s file format. You can just create your spreadsheets, save them, and let Excel take care of the rest. The only time you need to stop and think twice is when you need to share your work with other, less fortunate people who have older versions of Excel, such as Excel 2003. You’ll learn how to deal with this challenge in the following sections. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Under the Hood with .xlsx Files Here’s a shocking secret: The new .xlsx file format is actually a ZIP file in disguise. It’s composed of several files that are compressed and then packaged together as a single unit. With a little know-how, you can take a look at these hidden files-within-a-file, which makes for a great Excel party trick. Here’s how: 1. Save your Excel spreadsheet in .xlsx format. 2. Browse to the file (using My Computer, Windows Explorer, or your favorite file management tool). If you’re lazy, you can save the file on the desktop so you can manipulate it right there. 3. Right-click the file, and then choose Rename.

5. Now, open the ZIP file by double-clicking the file. 6. You can now see the files that are hidden inside your Excel file. They’re organized into several folders (Figure 1-17). To find the actual content from your spreadsheet, head to xl➝worksheets➝sheet1.xml. Double-click it to open it up and take a look at what’s inside. 7. When you’re finished, rename the file using its .xlsx extension so you can open it in Excel. To learn way more about the technical details of this type of file storage, you can read the Microsoft white paper at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx.

4. Change the file extension to .zip. So if you start with BlackMarketDinnerware.xlsx, change it to BlackMarketDinnerware.zip.

Figure 1-17: Inside every .xlsx file lurks a number of compressed files, each with different information. For example, separate files store printer settings, styles, the name of the person who created the document, the composition of your workbook, and each individual worksheet.

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Saving Files

Tip: Don’t use the .xlsb format unless you’ve tried it out and find it really does give better performance for one of your spreadsheets. Usually, .xlsx and .xlsb are just as fast. And remember, the only time you’ll see any improvement is when you’re loading or saving a file. Once your spreadsheet is open in Excel, everything else (like scrolling around and performing calculations) happens at the same speed.

Sharing Your Spreadsheet with Excel 2007 As you’ve just learned, Excel 2007 uses the same .xlsx file format as Excel 2010. That means that an Excel 2010 fan can exchange files with an Excel 2007 devotee, and there won’t be any technical problems. However, there are still a few issues that can trip you up when sharing spreadsheets between Excel 2010 and Excel 2007. For example, Excel 2010 introduces a few new formula functions, such as RANK.AVG (page 273). If you write a calculation that uses this function in Excel 2010, it won’t work when someone else opens the spreadsheet in Excel 2007. Instead of seeing the numeric result that you saw, they’ll see an error code mixed in with the rest of the spreadsheet data. To avoid this sort of problem, you need the help of an Excel tool called the Compatibility Checker. The Compatibility Checker scans your spreadsheet to find features and formulas that will cause a problem in Excel 2007. To use the Compatibility Checker, follow these steps: 1. Choose File➝Info. Excel switches into backstage view. 2. Click the Check for Issues button, and choose Check Compatibility. The Compatibility Checker scans your spreadsheet, looking for signs of trouble. It then reports any problems back to you (Figure 1-18). 3. Optionally, you can hide problems that don’t affect Excel 2007. The Compatibility Checker reports on two types of problems. The first type of problems affect anyone who doesn’t have Excel 2010. These problems appear with the text “Excel 97-2003” and “Excel 2007” in the column on the right. The second problems affect Excel 2003 users but not Excel 2007 users. These problems appear with the text “Excel 97-2003” in the right column. If you plan to share your spreadsheet file with Excel 2007 only, there’s no need to worry about Excel 2003 compatibility. You can hide these messages from the list by clicking the “Select versions to show” button and turning off Excel 97-2003.

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Figure 1-18: In this example, the Compatibility Checker has found two potential problems. One will affect only Excel 2003 users, while the other will affect both Excel 2007 and Excel 2003 users.

4. Review the problems. You can choose to ignore the Compatibility Checker issues, click Find to hunt each one down, or click Help to figure out the exact problem. You can also click Copy to New Sheet to insert a full compatibility report into your spreadsheet as a separate worksheet. This way, you can print it up and review it in the comfort of your cubicle. (To get back to the worksheet with your data, click the Sheet1 tab at the bottom of the window. Chapter 4 has more about how to use and manage multiple worksheets.) Note: The problems that the Compatibility Checker finds won’t cause serious errors, like crashing your computer or corrupting your data. That’s because Excel is designed to degrade gracefully. That means you can still open a spreadsheet that uses newer, unsupported features in an old version of Excel. However, you may receive a warning message and part of the spreadsheet may seem broken—that is, it won’t work as you intended.

5. Optionally, you can set the Compatibility Checker to run automatically for this workbook. Turn on the “Check compatibility when saving this workbook” checkbox. Now, the Compatibility Checker will run each time you save your spreadsheet, just before the file is updated.

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Saving Files

Saving Your Spreadsheet for Excel 2003 If you want to share your workbook with people who are using Excel 2003, the process is a bit more involved, because Excel 2003 uses the older .xls format instead of .xlsx. When you find yourself in this situation, you have two choices: • Save your spreadsheet in the old format. You can save a copy of your spreadsheet in the traditional .xls Excel standard that’s been supported since Excel 97. To do so, choose File➝Save As, and then, from the “Save as type” list, choose Excel 97-2003 Workbook. • Use a free add-in for older versions of Excel. People who are stuck with Excel 2000, Excel 2002, or Excel 2003 can read your Excel 2010 files—they just need a free add-in that’s provided by Microsoft. This is a good solution because it’s doesn’t require any work on your part. People with past-its-prime versions of Excel can find the add-in they need by surfing to www.microsoft.com/downloads and searching for “compatibility pack file formats” (or use the secret shortcut URL http://tinyurl.com/y5w78r). However, you should still run the Compatibility Checker to find out if your spreadsheet uses features that aren’t supported in Excel 2003. Tip: When you save your Excel spreadsheet in another format, make sure to keep a copy in the standard .xlsx format. Why bother? Because other formats aren’t guaranteed to retain all your information, particularly if you choose a format that doesn’t support some of Excel’s newer features.

As you already know, each version of Excel introduces a small set of new features. Older versions of Excel don’t support these features. The differences between Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 are small. But the differences between Excel 2003 and Excel 2010 are more significant. Excel tries to help you out in two ways. First, whenever you save a file in .xls format, Excel automatically runs the Compatibility Checker to review your spreadsheet and detect compatibility issues. Second, whenever you open a spreadsheet that’s in the old .xls file format, Excel switches into compatibility mode. While the Compatibility Checker points out potential problems after the fact, compatibility mode is designed to prevent you from using unsupported features in the first place. For example, in compatibility mode you’ll face these restrictions: • Excel limits you to a smaller grid of cells (65,536 rows instead of 1,048,576). • Excel prevents you from using really long or deeply nested formulas. • Excel doesn’t let you use some pivot table features. In compatibility mode, these missing features aren’t anywhere to be found. In fact, compatibility mode is so seamless that you might not even notice you’re being limited. The only clear indication is the title bar at the top of the Excel window. Instead of seeing something like CateringList.xlsx, you’ll see CateringList.xls [Compatibility Mode]. chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Note: When you save an Excel workbook in .xls format, Excel won’t switch into compatibility mode right away. Instead, you need to close the workbook and reopen it.

If you decide at some point that you’re ready to move into the modern world and convert your file to the .xlsx format favored by Excel 2010, you can use the trusty File➝Save As command. However, there’s an even quicker shortcut. Just choose File➝Info, and click the Convert button. This saves an Excel 2010 version of your file with the same name but with the extension .xlsx, and reloads the file so you get out of compatibility mode. It’s up to you to delete your old .xls original if you don’t need it anymore.

Saving a Spreadsheet in Other Formats Some eccentric individuals have even older or stranger spreadsheet software on their computers. If you want to save a copy of your spreadsheet in a more exotic file type, you can choose File➝Save As, and then find the desired format in the “Save as type” drop-down list (Figure 1-19). Alternatively, you can get quick access to the most popular file formats by choosing File➝Save & Send and then clicking Change File Type. Double-click one of the file types that’s shown here to open the Save As dialog box with your choice already filled in the “Save as type” box. Excel lets you save your spreadsheet using a variety of different formats, including the classic Excel 95 format from more than a decade ago. If you’re looking to view your spreadsheet using a mystery program, use the CSV file type, which produces a comma-delimited text file that almost all spreadsheet applications on any operating system can read (comma-delimited means the information has commas separating each cell).

Saving Your Spreadsheet As a PDF Sometimes you want to save a copy of your spreadsheet so that people can read it even if they don’t have Excel (and even if they’re running a different operating system, like Linux or Apple’s OS X). In this situation, you have several choices: • Use the Excel Viewer. Even if you don’t have Excel, you can install a separate tool called the Excel Viewer, which is available from Microsoft’s website (search for “Excel Viewer” at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads). However, few people have the viewer, and even though it’s free, few want to bother installing it. And it doesn’t work on non-Windows computers. • Save your workbook as an HTML web page. That way, all you need to view the workbook is a web browser (and who doesn’t have one of those?). The only disadvantage is that you could lose complex formatting. Some worksheets may make the transition to HTML gracefully, while others don’t look very good when they’re squashed into a browser window. And if you’re planning to let other people print the exported worksheet, the results might be unsatisfactory. The next section has more about saving your worksheet as a web page.

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Saving Files

Figure 1-19: Excel offers a few useful file type options in the “Save as type” list. CSV format is the best choice for compatibility with truly old software (or when nothing else seems to work). The four most commonly used formats—regular workbooks, macroenabled workbooks, binary workbooks, and old-style Excel 2003 workbooks—sit at the top of the list.

• Save your workbook as a PDF file. This gets you the best of both worlds—you keep all the rich formatting (so your workbook can be printed), and you let people who don’t have Excel (and possibly don’t even have Windows) view your work. Excel 2007 introduced the Save As PDF feature, but it forced Excel fans to download an add-in to get it. Excel 2010 has no such limitation. To save your spreadsheet as a PDF, you simply select File➝Save As, and then pick PDF from the “Save as type” list. Or choose File➝Save & Send, click Create PDF/XPS Document (in the “File Types” section), and then click the Create PDF/XPS button. It doesn’t matter whether you use the File➝Save As or the File➝Save & Send approach. Either way, you end up at a modified version of the Save As dialog box that has a few additional options (Figure 1-20). The “Publish as PDF” dialog box gives you some control over the quality settings with the “Optimize for” options. If you’re just saving a PDF copy so other people can view the information in your workbook, choose “Minimum size (publishing online)” to save some space. On the other hand, if there’s a possibility that the people reading your PDF might want to print it out, choose “Standard (publishing online and printing)” to save a slightly larger PDF that makes for a better printout.

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Figure 1-20: PDF files can be saved with different resolution and quality settings (which mostly affect any graphical objects like pictures and charts that you’ve placed in your workbook). Normally, you use higher quality settings if you’re planning to print your PDF file, because printers use higher resolutions than computer monitors.

UP TO SPEED

Learning to Love PDFs You’ve probably heard about PDFs, Adobe’s popular format for sharing formatted, print-ready documents. People use PDFs to pass around product manuals, brochures, and all sorts of electronic documents. Unlike a document format like .xlsx, PDF files are designed to be viewed and printed, but not edited. The best part about PDFs is that you can view them on just about any type of computer and operating system using the free Adobe Reader. You can download Adobe Reader at http://get.adobe.com/reader, but you probably don’t need to. Most computers already have Adobe Reader installed, because it comes bundled with so many different

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programs (usually so you can view their electronic documentation). It’s also widely used on the Web. Incidentally, PDF isn’t the only kid on the block. Microsoft’s newer operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows 7, include another electronic paper format called XPS (XML Paper Specification). In time, as XPS is integrated into more and more products, it might become a true PDF competitor. But for now, PDF is dramatically more popular and widespread, so it’s the one to stick with. (If you’re interested in saving an Excel document as a XPS file, you can do that too—just choose XPS from the “Save as type” list.)

Saving Files

You can switch on the “Open file after publishing” setting to tell Excel to open the PDF file in Adobe Reader (assuming you have it installed) after the publishing process is complete, so you can check the result. Finally, if you want to publish only a portion of your spreadsheet as a PDF file, click the Options button to open a dialog box with even more settings. You can choose to publish just a fixed number of pages, just the selected cells, and so on. These options mirror the choices you get when sending a spreadsheet to the printer (page 211). You also see a few more cryptic options, most of which you can safely ignore. (They’re intended for PDF nerds.) One exception is the “Document properties” option—turn this off if you don’t want the PDF to keep track of certain information that identifies you, like your name. (Excel document properties are discussed in more detail on page 719.)

Saving Your Spreadsheet As an HTML File HTML (short for Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the Web. Web authors use it to craft pages with text, links, and graphics. In the early days of the Web, most programs had export-to-HTML features that weren’t worth a second glance. They distorted formatting, mangled text, and generated HTML so ugly that professional web developers fainted at the sight of it. Fortunately, the situation has improved. Though Excel’s HTML exporting might never match the graphical flair of the most talented web artists, it’s still downright impressive. Best of all, you can have your data ready for web surfers in a matter of minutes. Here’s what to do: 1. Choose File➝Save As. This action opens the Save As dialog box. 2. From the “Save as type” list, choose Web Page. When you do, the Save As dialog box changes a little bit, as shown in Figure 1-21. 3. Choose which portion of your workbook you want to export to HTML. If you want to export every worksheet, select Entire Workbook. If you just want to export the current worksheet, then select Selection: Sheet. (Every Excel workbook begins with three worksheets, and so far you’ve only used the first one. You’ll learn how to use the others—and add more—in Chapter 4.) Tip: If you export the entire workbook, then Excel creates a web page that includes worksheet tab buttons, which you can use to switch from one worksheet to another. Generally, it’s simpler to just export a single worksheet—that makes more sense to web surfers.

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Figure 1-21: When you’re saving a spreadsheet as a web page, the Save As dialog box gets a couple of new buttons. Use Change Title to set the web page’s title. You can also choose to save either the entire workbook or just the current selection.

If you select a group of cells before you choose File➝Save, then you won’t see the Selection: Sheet option. Instead, you’ll see an option for the range of cells you chose, like “Selection: $A$2:$B$5.” (This means “the box of cells stretching from cell A2 in the top-left to cell B5 in the bottom-right.”) Choose this to create a web page that includes just that section of content. 4. If you want to add a title, click the Change Title button. When the Set Page Title dialog box appears, type in a title for your web page, and then click OK. If you add a descriptive title, it appears in large bold font centered over the rest of your content. Titles don’t have any restrictions, so feel free to use something clear and descriptive like “Blue Skies Budget Report” or “Bankruptcy Projections for 2011.” This title also appears in the title bar of the web browser window. (Without the title information, most web browsers simply show the web page file name in their title bar.) 5. Browse to the location where you want to save the web page. This location can be any of the places where you normally save files.

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Saving Files

6. In the “File name” box, enter the name of the HTML file you want to create. Depending on the content in your worksheet, Excel may create more than one file. If your worksheet contains embedded graphics or charts, or if you’re printing the entire workbook, Excel creates additional files. Excel puts these files in a newly created folder that has the same name as your file, plus the text “_files.” If you save the web page BudgetReport.htm, Excel creates a folder named BudgetReport_files to hold the extra files. You need to keep the HTML file and this folder together at all times, because the folder contains some information that the HTML file uses. (The box on page 51 has more about these folders.) 7. You now have a choice to either save or publish your web page. If you want to perform a direct save of your file, effectively converting your current workbook into the HTML format, click the Save button. The original copy of your workbook remains in an .xlsx file, but Excel won’t update it again unless you choose File Menu➝Save As and explicitly select it. If you want to publish your file, which creates a copy of your data in the HTML format, click Publish. This launches the “Publish as Web Page” dialog box, which gives you a last-minute chance to select the portion of the workbook you want to publish and change the file name or web page title. You’ve already set all the options you need, so just click Publish to save your HTML file. Your workbook remains in the .xlsx format, but Excel makes an HTML copy suitable for viewing in your browser. Note: When you use the “Publish as Web Page” dialog box, you can select “AutoRepublish every time this workbook is saved” to tell Excel to save the HTML copy of your workbook every time you save the .xlsx workbook file.

The exported copy of your worksheet is amazingly faithful. Excel preserves the formatting, layout, and content of your original worksheet. If your worksheet contains pictures or charts, Excel saves a separate graphic file for each object and displays it in the same web page using the linking power of HTML. Figure 1-22 shows an exported worksheet that includes a chart. Note: It goes without saying that while other people can view an Excel-created web page, they can’t edit it. However, Excel 2010 blows the lid off this limitation with the Excel Web App—a simplified version of Excel that runs right in the browser. This tool is entirely free to use, even for people who don’t have the desktop version of Excel. Chapter 26 covers the Excel Web App in detail.

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Figure 1-22: The HTML version of a spreadsheet, as displayed in Internet Explorer (top), mimics its appearance in Excel (bottom) with surprising accuracy. You need to get used to a few minor changes—like the fact that the HTML version doesn’t show any gridlines and can’t display nonstandard fonts. The solution? Stick to commonly supported Web fonts, like Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, and Verdana (to name the most popular).

Saving Your Spreadsheet with a Password Occasionally, you might want to add confidential information to a spreadsheet—for example, a list of the airlines from which you’ve stolen spoons. If your computer is on a network, the solution may be as simple as storing your file in the correct, protected location. But if you’re afraid that you might inadvertently email the spreadsheet to the wrong people (say, executives at American Airlines), or if you’re about to expose systematic accounting irregularities in your company’s year-end statements,

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you’ll be happy to know that Excel provides a tighter degree of security. It allows you to password-protect your spreadsheets, which means anyone who wants to open them has to know the password you’ve set. Excel actually has two layers of password protection that you can apply to a spreadsheet: • You can prevent others from opening your spreadsheet unless they know the correct password. This level of security, which scrambles your data for anyone without the password (a process known as encryption), is the strongest. • You can let others read a spreadsheet, but you can prevent them from modifying it unless they know the correct password. You can apply one or both of these restrictions to a spreadsheet. Applying them is easy. Just follow these steps: 1. Choose File➝Save As. The Save As dialog box appears. GEM IN THE ROUGH

A Convenient Web Page Package When you save your Excel data in an HTML page, Excel usually creates several files—one each for pictures and charts. Web browsers don’t know anything about Excel charts, so Excel turns those into .gif files that any browser can display. Excel also uses additional files if you save an entire workbook, in which case it places each worksheet in a separate file. In order to keep everything organized, Excel stores all these extra files in a linked folder. If you save your Excel file as the web page BudgetReport.htm, Excel creates a folder called BudgetReport_files to hold extra files. Usually, you don’t need to worry about which files are in this folder. Instead, you just load the main page (the one called BudgetReport. htm) in your browser. You do, however, need to make sure the folder is always available, because the main page links to the files it contains. That means if you want to move your HTML page to another location or another computer, then you need to make sure that you copy the linked folder with it.

Keeping track of all these files can be a bit of a headache. What if you want to email your Excel web page to another person? You’ll need to not only email all the files, but also explain how to create the required directory to hold all these files. Fortunately, you can use an easier solution. The trick is to save everything using a special web archive format called .mht. When you save a .mht file, everything is combined into one compound file, including graphics. You can’t easily edit .mht files, and they’re supported only in Internet Explorer (other browsers, like Firefox or Opera, need not apply). However, .mht files are a great way to package everything up into one file when you need to send it in an email. To save a .mht file, select File➝Save As. In the “Save as type” list, choose Single File Web Page. Choose any other options you want, and click Save or Publish to finish the job.

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2. Click the Tools button, and then, from the pop-up menu, choose General Options. If you’re using a Windows XP computer, you’ll find the Tools button in the bottom-left corner of the Save As dialog box. But if you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7, it’s at the bottom right, just next to the Save button. The General Options dialog box appears. 3. Type a password next to the security level you want to turn on (as shown in Figure 1-23). Then click OK. The General Options dialog box also gives you a couple of other unrelated options: • Turn on the “Always create backup” checkbox if you want an extra copy of your file, just in case something goes wrong. (Think of it as insurance.) Excel creates a backup that has the file extension .xlk. For example, if you’re saving a workbook named SimpleExpenses.xlsx and you use the “Always create backup” option, Excel creates a file named “Backup of SimpleExpenses.xlk” every time you save your spreadsheet. You can open the .xlk file in Excel just like an ordinary Excel file. When you do, you see that it has an exact copy of your work. • Turn on the “Read-only recommended” checkbox to prevent other people from accidentally making changes to your spreadsheet. When you use this option, Excel shows a message every time you (or anyone else) opens the file. This message politely suggests that you open the spreadsheet in read-only mode, in which case Excel won’t allow any changes. Of course, it’s entirely up to the person opening the file whether to accept this recommendation. Figure 1-23: You can use any sequence of letters and numbers as a password. Passwords are case-sensitive (which means that PanAm is different from panam), and they are masked (which means that all that appears in the window as you type is a series of asterisks).

4. Click Save to store the file. If you use a password to restrict people from opening the spreadsheet, Excel prompts you to supply the “password to open” the next time you open the file (Figure 1-24, top).

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Saving Files

If you use a password to restrict people from modifying the spreadsheet, the next time you open this file you’ll be given the choice—shown in Figure 1-24, bottom— to open it in read-only mode (which requires no password) or to open it in full edit mode (in which case you’ll need to supply the “password to modify”). Figure 1-24: Top: You can give a spreadsheet two layers of protection. Assign a “password to open,” and you’ll see this window when you open the file Bottom: If you assign a “password to modify,” you’ll see the choices in this window. If you use both passwords, you’ll see both windows, one after the other.

Disaster Recovery The corollary to the edict “Save your data early and often” is the truism “Sometimes things fall apart quickly…before you’ve even had a chance to back up.” Fortunately, Excel includes an invaluable safety net called AutoRecover. AutoRecover periodically saves backup copies of your spreadsheet while you work. If you suffer a system crash, you can retrieve the last AutoRecover backup even if you never managed to save the file yourself. Of course, even the AutoRecover backup won’t necessarily have all the information you entered in your spreadsheet before the problem occurred. But if AutoRecover saves a backup every 10 minutes (the standard), at most you’ll lose 10 minutes of work. If your computer does crash, when you get it running again, you can easily retrieve your last AutoRecover backup. In fact, the next time you launch Excel, it automatically checks the backup folder and, if it finds a backup, it opens a Document Recovery panel on the left of the Excel window. If your computer crashes mid-edit, the next time you open Excel you’ll probably see the same file listed twice in the Document Recovery window, as shown in Figure 1-25. The difference is the status. The status [AutoSaved] indicates the most recent backup created by Excel. The status [Original] indicates the last version of the file that you saved (which is safely stored on your hard drive, right where you expect it).

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Figure 1-25: You can save or open an AutoRecover backup just as you would an ordinary Excel file; simply click the item in the list. Once you’ve dealt with all the backup files, close the Document Recovery window by clicking the Close button. If you haven’t saved your backup, Excel asks you at this point whether you want to save it permanently or delete the backup.

To open a file that’s in the Document Recovery window, just click it. You can also use a drop-down menu with additional options (Figure 1-24). Make sure to save the file before you leave Excel. After all, it’s just a temporary backup. If you attempt to open a backup file that’s somehow been scrambled (technically known as corrupted), Excel automatically attempts to repair it. You can choose Show Repairs to display a list of any changes Excel had to make to recover the file. AutoRecover settings AutoRecover comes switched on when you install Excel, but you can tweak its settings. Choose File➝Options, and then choose the Save section. Under the “Save workbooks” section, make sure that “Save AutoRecover information” is turned on. You can also make a few other changes to AutoRecover settings: • You can adjust the backup frequency in minutes. (See Figure 1-26 for tips on timing.) • You can control whether Excel keeps a backup if you create a new spreadsheet, work on it for at least 10 minutes, and then close it without saving your work. This sort of AutoRecover backup is called a draft, and it’s discussed in more detail on page 83. Ordinarily, the setting “Keep the last Auto Recovered file if I exit without saving” is switched on, and Excel keeps drafts. (To find all the drafts that Excel has saved for you, choose File➝Recent and click the Recover Unsaved Workbooks link at the bottom of the window.)

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Opening Files

Figure 1-26: You can configure how often AutoRecover saves backups. There’s really no danger in being too frequent. Unless you work with extremely complex or large spreadsheets—which might suck up a lot of computing power and take a long time to save—you can set Excel to save the document every five minutes with no appreciable slowdown.

• You can choose the folder where you’d like Excel to save backup files. The standard folder works fine for most people, but feel free to pick some other place. Unfortunately, there’s no handy Browse button to help you find the folder, so you need to find the folder you want in advance (using a tool like Windows Explorer), write it down somewhere, and then copy the full folder path into this dialog box. • Under the “AutoRecover exceptions” heading, you can tell Excel not to bother saving a backup of a specific spreadsheet. Pick the spreadsheet name from the list (which shows all the currently open spreadsheet files), and then turn on the “Disable AutoRecover for this workbook only” setting. This setting is exceedingly uncommon, but you might use it if you have a gargantuan spreadsheet full of data that doesn’t need to be backed up. For example, this spreadsheet might hold records that you’ve pulled out of a central database so you can take a closer look. In this case, there’s no need to create a backup because your spreadsheet just has a copy of the data that’s in the database. (If you’re interested in learning more about this scenario, check out Chapter 23.)

Opening Files Opening existing files in Excel works much the same as it does in any Windows program. To get to the standard Open dialog box, choose File➝Open (or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+O). Using the Open dialog box, you can browse to find the spreadsheet file you want, and then click Open to load it into Excel. Excel can open many file types other than its native .xlsx format. To learn the other formats it supports, launch the Open dialog box and, at the bottom, open the “Files of type” menu, which shows you the whole list. If you want to open a file but you don’t know what format it’s in, try using the first option on the menu, “All Files.” chapter 1: creating your first spreadsheet

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Once you choose a file, Excel scans the beginning of the file and informs you about the type of conversion it will attempt to perform (based on what type of file Excel thinks it is). Note: Depending on your computer settings, Windows might hide file extensions. That means that instead of seeing the Excel spreadsheet file MyCoalMiningFortune.xlsx, you’ll just see the name MyCoalMiningFortune (without the .xlsx part on the end). In this case, you can still tell what the file type is by looking at the icon. If you see a small Excel icon next to the file name, that means Windows recognizes that the file is an Excel spreadsheet. If you see something else (like a tiny paint palette, for example), you need to make a logical guess about what type of file it is.

The Open dialog box also lets you open several spreadsheets in one step, as long as they’re all in the same folder. To use this trick, hold down the Ctrl key and click to select each file. Whe you click Open, Excel puts each one in a separate window, just as if you’d opened them one after the other.

Opening Recent Documents Plan to take another crack at a recent spreadsheet? You can find the most recently opened documents in Excel’s Recent Documents list. To see this list, just choose File➝Recent. The list holds 20 files. The best part about the Recent Documents list is the way you can pin a document there so it stays forever, as shown in Figure 1-27.

Figure 1-27: To keep a spreadsheet around on the Recent Documents list, click the thumbtack on the right. Excel moves your workbook to the top of the list and pins it in place. That means it won’t ever leave the list, no matter how many documents you open. If you decide to stop working with it later on, just click the thumbtack again to release it. Pinning is a great trick for keeping your most important files at your fingertips.

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You can put recent documents even closer at hand by switching on the “Quickly access this number of Recent Workbooks” checkbox, which you’ll find underneath the list of recent documents. You can then enter a number in the adjacent box. For example, if you use 4 (the standard value), the four most recently used workbooks will appear directly in the column of commands on the left side of Excel’s backstage view. That means that if one of them is named MyFavoriteFile.xlsx, you can open it by choosing File➝MyFavoriteFile.xlsx, rather than choosing File➝Recent, and then clicking MyFavoriteFile.xlsx in the recent files list. Tip: Do you want to hide your recent editing work? You can remove any file from the recent document list by right-clicking it and choosing “Remove from list.” And if the clutter is keeping you from finding the workbooks you want, just pin the important files, then right-click any file and choose “Clear unpinned workbooks.” This action removes every file that isn’t pinned down.

Just to the right of the Recent Documents list is the Recent Places list. It keeps track of the folders where you store your Excel files. So if you like to place Excel spreadsheets on your desktop and in your documents folder, you’ll see both folders in the list (as in in Figure 1-27). When you click a location, Excel heads to the appropriate location and shows the standard Open dialog box. If you store your work in several different locations, far and wide, this feature can save you from digging through the directory tree. It’s particularly handy if you store documents on different drives or on a network. And just like the Recent Documents list, you can pin folders to the Recent Places list.

Protected View Even something that seems as innocent as an Excel file can’t always be trusted. Protected view is a new security feature in Excel 2010. It opens potentially risky Excel files in a specially limited Excel window. You’ll know that you’re in protected view because Excel doesn’t allow you to edit any of the data in the workbook, and it displays a message bar at the top of the window (Figure 1-28). Excel automatically uses protected view when you download a spreadsheet from the Web or open it from your email inbox. This is actually a huge convenience, because Excel doesn’t need to hassle you with questions when you try to view the file (such as “are you sure you want to open this file?”). Because Excel’s protected view has bulletproof security, it’s a safe way to view the most suspicious spreadsheet. At this point, you’re probably wondering about the risks of rogue spreadsheets. Truthfully, they’re quite small. The most obvious danger is macro code: miniature programs that are stored in a spreadsheet file and can perform Excel tasks. Poorly written or malicious macro code can tamper with your Excel settings, lock up the program, and even scramble your data. But before you panic, consider this: Excel macro viruses are very rare, and the .xlsx file format doesn’t even allow macro code. Instead, macro-containing files must be saved as .xlsm or .xlsb files.

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Figure 1-28: Currently, this file is in protected view. If you decide that it’s safe and you need to edit its content, click the Enable Editing button to open in the normal Excel window with no security safeguards.

The more subtle danger is that crafty hackers could create corrupted Excel files that might exploit tiny security holes in the program. One of these files could scramble Excel’s brains in a dangerous way, possibly causing it to execute a scrap of malicious computer code that could do almost anything. Once again, this sort of attack is extremely rare. It might not even be possible with the up-to-date .xlsx file format. But protected view completely removes any chance of an attack, which helps corporate bigwigs sleep at night.

Opening Files—with a Twist The Open dialog box harbors a few tricks. To see these hidden secrets, first select the file you want to use (by clicking it once, not twice), and then click the drop-down arrow on the right-side of the Open button. A menu with several additional options appears, as shown in Figure 1-29. Here’s what these different choices do: • Open opens the file in the normal way. • Open Read-Only opens the file, but won’t let you save changes. This option is great if you want to make sure you don’t accidentally overwrite an existing file. (For example, if you’re using last month’s sales invoice as a starting point for this month’s sales invoice, you might use Open Read-Only to make sure you can’t accidentally wipe out the existing file.) If you open a document in read-only mode, you can still make changes—you just have to save the file with a new file name (choose File➝Save As).

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Figure 1-29: Why settle for the plain-vanilla Open command when you have all these other choices?

• Open as Copy creates a copy of the spreadsheet file in the same folder. If your file is named Book1.xlsx, the copy will be named “Copy of Book1.xlsx”. This feature comes in handy if you’re about to start editing a spreadsheet and want to be able to look at the last version you saved. Excel won’t let you open the same file twice. However, you can load the previous version by selecting the same file and using “Open as Copy”. (Of course, this technique works only when you have changes you haven’t saved yet. Once you save the current version of a file, the older version is overwritten and lost forever.) • Open in Browser is only available when you select an HTML file. This option allows you to open the HTML file in your computer’s web browser, which is something you’ll only want to attempt when trying to convert Excel files to web pages (page 47). • Open in Protected View prevents a potentially dangerous file from running any code. However, you’ll also be restrained from editing the file, as explained on page 57.

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• Open and Repair is useful if you need to open a file that’s corrupted. If you try to open a corrupted file by just clicking Open, Excel warns you that the file has problems and refuses to open it. To get around this problem, you can open the file using the “Open and Repair” option, which prompts Excel to make the necessary corrections, display them for you in a list, and then open the document. Depending on the type of problem, you might not lose any information at all.

Working with Multiple Open Spreadsheets As you open multiple spreadsheets, Excel creates a new window for each one. Although this helps keep your work separated, it can clause a bit of clutter and make it harder to track down the window you really want. Fortunately, Excel provides a couple of shortcuts that are indispensable when dealing with several spreadsheets at a time: • To jump from one spreadsheet to another, find the window in the View➝ Window➝Switch Windows list, which includes the file name of all the currently open spreadsheets (Figure 1-30). Figure 1-30: When you have multiple spreadsheets open at the same time, you can easily move from one to the other using the Switch Windows list.

• To move to the next spreadsheet, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+F6. • To move to the previous spreadsheet, use the shortcut key Ctrl+Shift+Tab or Ctrl+Shift+F6. When you have multiple spreadsheets open at the same time, you need to take a little more care when closing a window so you don’t accidentally close the entire Excel application—unless you want to. Here are your choices: • You can close all the spreadsheets at once. To do so, you need to close the Excel window. Select File➝Exit from any active spreadsheet, or just hold down Shift while you click the close icon (the infamous X button) in the top-right corner of the Excel window.

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• You can close a single spreadsheet. To do so, right-click the spreadsheet on the taskbar and click Close. Or switch to the spreadsheet you want to close (by clicking the matching taskbar button) and then choose File➝Close. Note: One of the weirdest limitations in Excel occurs if you try to open more than one file with the same name. No matter what steps you take, you can’t coax Excel to open both of them at once. It doesn’t matter if the files have different content or if they’re in different folders or even different drives. When you try to open a file that has the same name as a file that’s already open, Excel displays an error message and refuses to go any further. Sadly, the only solution is to open the files one at a time, or rename one of them.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Handy Options for Opening and Saving Files If you’re in the habit of configuring your software programs to get the most out of them, you’ll be happy to hear that Excel has several useful details to tweak. To see them, choose File➝Options. Here are the most useful things you can do: • Adjust your starting point. When you open a file or save it for the first time, Excel starts you off in your personal documents folder. This folder is a Windowsspecific folder that many programs assume you use for all your files. If you don’t use this folder, you can tell Excel to look elsewhere when saving and opening files. Choose the Save section, and then look under the “Save workbooks” heading for the “Default file location” text box. You can modify it so that it points to the folder where you usually store files (as in C:\ John Smith\MyExcel Files). Sadly, you can’t browse and pick the path from a dialog box—instead, you need to type it in by hand. • Keep track of more recent documents. Why stick with 20 recent documents when you can show dozens? If you want to keep track of more recent work, and you aren’t deterred by a long Recent Documents list, choose the Advanced section, scroll down to the Display group of settings, and then change the “Show this number of Recent Documents.” You can pick any number from 0 to 50.

• Change the standard file type. Most Excel fans prefer the new .xlsx file format, which Excel uses every time you save a new file (unless you explicitly choose another option in the “Save as type” list). However, if you’ve decided that something else suits you better, like the binary .xlsb format (page 39) or the legacy .xls format, you can tell Excel to use this by default instead. Choose the Save section, look under the “Save workbooks” heading, and then change the “Save files in this format” setting by choosing another file type from the list. • Get started with a bang. You can tell Excel to automatically open a whole group of spreadsheet files every time it starts up. To find this setting, choose the Advanced section, and then scroll to the General group of settings. You can use the “At startup, open all files in” text box to specify a folder where you put all the Excel files on which you’re currently working. Then, the next time you start Excel, it automatically opens every Excel file it finds in a separate window. Of course, if you decide to use this option, make sure you don’t clutter your in-progress folder with too many files, or Excel opens a dizzying number of windows when it starts.

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ow that you’ve created a basic worksheet, and you’re acquainted with Excel’s spiffy interface, it’s time to get down and dirty adding data. Whether you want to plan your household budget, build a sales invoice, or graph your soaring (or plunging) net worth, you first need to understand how Excel interprets the information you put in your worksheet. Depending on what kind of data you type into a cell, Excel classifies it as a date, a number, or a piece of text. In this chapter, you’ll learn how Excel makes up its mind and how you can make sure it makes the right decision. You’ll also learn how to use Excel’s best timesavers, including the indispensable Undo feature and the spell checker. Finally, you’ll consider inserting something completely different into your worksheets: a Web-style hyperlink.

Adding Different Types of Data One of Excel’s most important features is its ability to distinguish between different types of information. A typical worksheet contains both text and numbers. There isn’t a lot you can do in Excel with ordinary text (other than alphabetize a list, perform a simple spell check, and apply some basic formatting). On the other hand, Excel gives you a wide range of options for numeric data. For example, you can string your numbers together into complex calculations and formulas, or you can graph them on a chart. Programs that don’t distinguish between text and numbers—like Microsoft Word, for example—can’t provide these features.

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Most of the time, when you enter information in Excel, you don’t explicitly indicate the type of data. Instead, Excel examines the information you’ve typed in and, based on your formatting and other clues, classifies it automatically. Excel distinguishes between four core data types: • Ordinary text. This data type includes column headings, descriptions, and any content that Excel can’t identify as one of the other data types. • Numbers. This data type includes currency values, integers, fractions, percentages, and every other type of numeric data. Numbers are the basic ingredient of most Excel worksheets. • Dates and times. This data type includes dates (like Oct 3, 2010), times (like 4:30 p.m.), and combined date and time information (like Oct 3, 2010, 4:30 p.m.). You can enter date and time information in a variety of formats. • True or false values. This data type (known in geekdom as a Boolean value) can contain one of two things: TRUE or FALSE (displayed in all capitals). You don’t need Boolean data types in most worksheets, but they’re useful in worksheets that include Visual Basic macro code (see Chapter 29) or use complex formulas that evaluate conditions (see Chapter 13). One useful way to tell how Excel is interpreting your data is to look at cell alignment, as explained in Figure 2-1. Figure 2-1: Unless you explicitly change the alignment, Excel always left-aligns text (that is, it lines it up against the left edge of a cell), as in column A. On the other hand, it always right-aligns numbers and dates, as in columns B and C. And it centers Boolean values, as in column D.

Note: The standard alignment of text and numbers doesn’t just represent the whims of Excel—it also matches the behavior you want most of the time. For example, when you type in text, you usually want to start at the left edge so that subsequent entries in a column line up. But when entering numbers, you usually want them to line up on the decimal point so that it’s easier to scan a list of numbers and quickly spot small and large values. Of course, if you don’t like Excel’s standard formatting, you’re free to change it, as you’ll see in Chapter 5.

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As Figure 2-1 shows, Excel can display numbers and dates in several different ways. For example, some of the numbers include decimal places, one uses a comma, and one has a currency symbol. Similarly, one of the time values uses the 12-hour clock, while another uses the 24-hour clock. Other entries include only date information or both date and time information. You assume that when you type in a number, it will appear in the cell exactly the way you typed it. For example, when you type 3-comma-0-0-0 you expect to see 3,000. However, that doesn’t always happen. To see the problem in action, try typing 3,000 in a cell. It shows up exactly the way you entered it. Then, type over that value with 2000. The new number appears as 2,000. In this example, Excel remembers your first entry, and assumes that you want to use thousand separators in this cell all the time. These differences may seem like a spreadsheet free-for-all, but don’t despair—you can easily set the formatting of numbers and dates. (In fact, that’s the subject of Chapter 5.) At this point, all you need to know is that the values Excel stores in each cell don’t need to match exactly the values that it displays in each cell. For example, the number 4300 could be formatted as plain old 4300 or as the dollar amount $4,300. Excel lets you format your numbers so you have exactly the representation you want. At the same time, Excel treats all numbers equivalently, no matter how they’re formatted, which lets you combine them together in calculations. Figure 2-2 shows you how to find the underlying stored value of a cell. Figure 2-2: You can see the underlying value that Excel is storing for a cell by selecting the cell and then glancing at the formula bar. In this sheet, you can see that the value $299.99 is actually stored without the dollar currency symbol, which Excel applied only as part of the display format. Similarly, Excel stores the number 2,000 without the comma; it stores the date 1-Jun-10 as 6/1/2010; the time 12:30 p.m. as 12:30:00 PM, and the time 14:00:00 as 2:00:00 PM.

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Note: Excel assigns data types to each cell in your worksheet, and you can’t mix more than one data type in the same cell. For example, when you type in 44 fat cats, Excel interprets the whole thing as text because it contains letters. If you want to treat 44 as a number (so that you can perform calculations with it, say), then you need to split this content into two cells—one that contains the number 44 and one that contains the remaining text.

By looking at cell alignment, you can easily tell how Excel is interpreting your data. That’s helpful. But what happens when Excel’s interpretation is at odds with your wishes? For example, what if you type in something you consider a number but Excel freakishly treats it as text or vice versa? The first step to solving this problem is grasping the logic behind Excel’s automatic decision-making process.

How Excel Identifies Text If your cell meets any of the following criteria, Excel automatically treats the content as ordinary text: • It contains any letters. Thus, C123 is text, not a number. • It contains any punctuation that Excel can’t interpret numerically. Punctuation allowed in numbers and dates includes the comma (,), the decimal point (.), and the forward slash (/) or dash (-) for dates. When you type in any other punctuation, Excel treats the cell as text. Thus, 14! is text, not a number. Occasionally, Excel reads your data the wrong way. For example, you may have a value—like a Social Security number or a credit card number—that’s made up entirely of numeric characters but that you want to treat like text because you don’t ever want to perform calculations with it. In this case, Excel doesn’t know what you’re up to, and so it automatically treats the value as a number. You can also run into problems when you precede text with the equal sign (which tells Excel that you have a formula in progress), or when you use a series of numbers and dashes that you don’t intend to be part of a date (for example, you want to enter 1-2-3 but you don’t want Excel to read it as January 2, 2003—which is what it wants to do). In all these cases, the solution’s simple. Before you type the cell value, start by typing an apostrophe ('). The apostrophe tells Excel to treat the cell content as text. Figure 2-3 shows you how it works. Figure 2-3: To have Excel treat any number, date, or time as text, just precede the value with an apostrophe (you can see the apostrophe in the formula bar but not in the cell). This worksheet shows the result of typing 1-2-3, both with and without the initial apostrophe. When you store 1-2-3 as text, Excel left-aligns it, as if it were an all-text cell (and puts a tiny green triangle in the corner of the cell to let you know you may have made a mistake). The date, on the other hand, is right-aligned.

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When you precede a numeric value with an apostrophe, Excel checks out the cell to see what’s going on. When Excel determines that it can represent the content as a number, it places a green triangle in the top left corner of the cell and gives you a few options for dealing with the cell, as shown in Figure 2-4. Figure 2-4: In this worksheet, the number 42 is stored as text, thanks to the apostrophe that precedes it. Excel notices the apostrophe, wonders if it’s an unintentional error, and flags the cell by putting a tiny green triangle in the top-left corner. If you move to the cell, an exclamation mark icon appears, and, if you click that, a menu appears, letting you choose to convert the number or ignore the issue for this cell. Excel provides a similar menu if you enter a text date that has a two-digit year, as in ‘1-1-07. In this case, the menu allows you to convert the two-digit date to a four-digit date that has a year starting with 19 or 20.

Tip: When you type in either false or true (using any capitalization you like), Excel automatically recognizes the data type as Boolean value instead of text, converts it to the uppercase word FALSE or TRUE, and centers it in the cell. If you want to make a cell that contains false or true treat it as text and not as Boolean data, start by typing an apostrophe (‘) at the beginning of the cell.

How Excel Identifies Numbers Excel automatically interprets any cell that contains only numeric characters as a number. In addition, you can add the following nonnumeric characters to a number without causing a problem: • One decimal point (but not two). For example, 42.1 is a number, but 42.1.1 is text. • One or more commas, provided you use them to separate groups of three numbers (like thousands, millions, and so on). Thus 1,200,200 is a valid number, but 1,200,20 is text. • A currency sign ($ for U.S. dollars), provided it’s at the beginning of the number.

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• A percent symbol at the beginning or end of the number (but not both). • A plus (+) or minus (−) sign before the number. You can also create a negative number by putting it in parentheses. In other words, entering (33) is the same as entering –33. • An equal sign at the start of the cell. This tells Excel that you’re starting a formula (page 227). The most important thing to understand about entering numbers is that when you choose to add other details like commas or the dollar sign, you’re actually doing two things at once: You’re entering a value for the cell and you’re setting the format for the cell, which affects how Excel displays the cell. Chapter 5 provides more information about number styles and shows how you can completely control cell formatting.

How Excel Identifies Dates and Times When typing in a date, you have a choice of formats. You can type in a full date (like July 4, 2010) or you can type in an abbreviated date using dashes or slashes (like 7-42010 or 7/4/2010), which is generally easier. If you enter some numbers formatted as a date, but the date you entered doesn’t exist (like the 30th day in February or the 13th month), then Excel interprets it as text. Figure 2-5 shows you the options. Figure 2-5: Whichever way you type the date in a cell, it always appears the same on the formula bar (the specific formula bar display depends on the regional settings on your computer, explained next). To fine-tune the way the date appears in the worksheet, you can use the formatting features discussed on page 138.

Because you can represent dates a few different ways, working with them can be tricky, and you’re likely to encounter some unexpected behavior from Excel. Here are some tips for using dates, trouble-free: • Instead of using a number for the month, you can use a three-letter month abbreviation, but you must put the month in the middle. In other words, you can use 7/4/2010 and 4/Jul/2010 interchangeably.

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• When you use a two-digit year as part of a date, Excel tries to guess whether the first two digits of the year should be 20 or 19. When the two-digit year is from 00 to 29, Excel assumes it belongs to the 21st century. If the year is from 30 to 99, Excel plants it in the 1900s. In other words, Excel translates 7/4/29 into 7/4/2029, while 7/4/30 becomes 7/4/1930. Tip: If you’re a mere mortal and forget where the cutoff point is, then enter the year as a four-digit number, which prevents any confusion.

• If you don’t type in any year at all, Excel automatically assumes you mean the current year. For example, when you enter 7/4, Excel inserts the date 7/4/2010 (assuming it’s currently 2010 on your computer’s internal clock). When you enter a date this way, the year component doesn’t show up in the cell, but it’s still stored in the worksheet (and visible on the formula bar). • Excel understands and displays dates differently depending on the regional settings on your computer. Windows has a setting that determines how your computer interprets dates (see the next section, page 70.) On a computer that’s configured with U.S. settings, Month-Day-Year is the standard progression. But on a UK-configured computer, Day-Month-Year is the deal. For example, in the U.S., either 11-7-09 or 11/7/09 is shorthand for November 7, 2009. In the UK or in Canada, the same notations refer to July 11, 2009. Thus, if your computer has U.S. regional settings turned on, and you type in 11/7/09, then Excel understands it as November 7, 2009, and the formula bar displays 11/7/2009. Note: The way Excel recognizes and displays dates varies according to the regional settings on your computer, but the way Excel stores dates does not. This feature comes in handy when you save a worksheet on one computer and then open it on another computer with different regional settings. Because Excel stores every date the same way, the date information remains accurate on the new computer, and Excel can display it according to the current regional settings.

Typing in times is more straightforward than typing in dates. You simply use numbers, separated by a colon (:). You need to include an hour and minute component at minimum (as in 7:30), but you can also add seconds (as in 7:30:10). You can use values from 1 to 24 for the hour part, though if your system’s set to use a 12-hour clock, Excel converts the time accordingly (in other words, 19:30 becomes 7:30 PM). If you want to use the 12-hour clock when you type in a time, follow your time with a space and the letters P or PM (or A or AM). Finally, you can create cells that have both date and time information. To do so, just type the date portion first, followed by a space, and then the time portion. For example, Excel happily accepts this combo: 7/4/2010 1:30 PM.

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Behind the scenes, Excel stores dates as serial numbers. It considers the date January 1, 1900 to be day 1. January 2, 1900 is day 2, and so on, up through the year 9999. This system is quite nifty, because if you use Excel to subtract one date from another, then you actually end up calculating the difference in days, which is exactly what you want. On the other hand, it means you can’t enter a date in Excel that’s earlier than January 1, 1900 (if you do, Excel treats your date like text). Similarly, Excel stores times as fractional numbers from 0 to 1. The number 0 represents 12:00 a.m. (the start of the day) and 0.99999 represents 11:59:59 p.m. (the end of the day). As with dates, this system allows you to subtract one time value from another. See Chapter 11 for more information on how to perform calculations that use dates and times.

Regional Dating Windows has regional settings for your computer, which affect the way Microsoft programs understand things like dates and currency. You can change the settings, and they don’t have to correspond to where you live—you can set them for your company headquarters on another continent, for instance. But keep in mind that these affect all the programs on your computer. Every version of Windows uses the same system for regional settings. (Note for tech nerds: You can find them in the Region and Language section of the Control Panel.) But if you’re not used to digging into your computer’s Control Panel, you’ll face a small problem, because every version of Windows puts them in a slightly different place. Here’s the easiest way to find them: • If you’re using Windows 7 or Windows Vista: Click the Start button. Then, in the search box at the bottom of the Start menu, type region. When Region and Language appears in the list of matches, click it. • If you’re using Windows XP: Click the Start button and choose Run. In the Run window, type intl.cpl and click OK. Either way, the Region and Language window will appear (see Figure 2-6). The most important setting is in the first box, which has a drop-down list you can use to pick the region you want, like English (United States) or Swedish (Finland). If you want to fine-tune the settings in your region, click the “Additional settings” button (in Windows 7), the “Customize this format” button (in Windows Vista), or the Customize button (in Windows XP). Although the name has changed over the years, it’s still the same button. You might decide to customize your region’s settings if you have a particular preference that doesn’t match the standard options. For example, you might decide that you want U.K.-formatted dates on a computer that’s set to use U.S.-region settings for everything else. When you customize a region, a new window appears (Figure 2-7) with a long list of settings. 70

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Figure 2-6: In the Region and Language window, you choose a geographical region and your computer stores a set of preferences about number and date display. Excel heeds these settings.

Tip: No matter what the regional settings are, you can always use the international date standard when typing dates into Excel, which is Year/Month/Day, though you must supply a four-digit year (as in 2008/7/4). If you use a two-digit year, Excel assumes you’re trying to use the Month-Day-Year or DayMonth-Year pattern.

Handy Timesavers Some of Excel’s frills can make your life easier when you’re entering data in a worksheet. This section covers four such timesaving features: AutoComplete, AutoCorrect, AutoFill, and AutoFit. Note: Excel really has two types of automatic features. First off, there are features that do things to your spreadsheets automatically, namely AutoComplete and AutoCorrect. Sometimes that’s cool and convenient, but other times it can send you running for the old manual typewriter. Fortunately, you can turn off both. Excel also has “auto” features that really aren’t that automatic. These include AutoFill and AutoFit, which never run on their own.

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Figure 2-7: Tweaking the regional settings on your computer gives you complete control over how Excel recognizes dates. Use the drop-down lists to specify the date separator, order of month, day, and year components in a date, and how Excel should interpret two-digit years. You can mix and match these settings freely, although you could wind up with a computer that’s completely counterintuitive to other people.

AutoComplete Some worksheets require that you type in the same information row after row. For example, if you’re creating a table to track the value of all your Sesame Street collectibles, you can type in Kermit only so many times before you start turning green. Excel tries to help you out with its AutoComplete feature, which examines what you type, compares it against previous entries in the same column, and, if it recognizes the beginning of an existing word, fills it in. For instance, in your Sesame Street worksheet, if you already have Kermit in the Characters column, when you start typing a new entry in that column beginning with the letter K, Excel automatically fills in the whole word Kermit. Excel then selects the letters that it’s added (in this case, ermit). You now have two options: • If you want to accept the AutoComplete text, move to another cell. For example, when you hit the right arrow key or press Enter to move down, Excel leaves the word Kermit behind.

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• If you want to blow off Excel’s suggestion, just keep typing. Because Excel automatically selects the AutoComplete portion of the word (ermit), your next keystrokes type over that text. Or, if you find the AutoComplete text is distracting, press Delete to remove it right away. Tip: When you want to use the AutoComplete text but change it slightly, turn on edit mode for the cell by pressing F2. Once you enter edit mode, you can use the arrow keys to move through the cell and make modifications.

AutoComplete has a few limitations. It works only with text entries, ignoring numbers and dates. It doesn’t pay any attention to the entries you’ve placed in other columns. And if there’s a blank row between the cell you’re working on and the values above it, Excel ignores them, assuming that they’re part of a different list that just happens to use the same column. Finally, Excel won’t give you a suggestion unless the text you’ve typed in matches the value in another cell unambiguously. This means that when your column contains two words that start with K, like Kermit and kerplop, Excel doesn’t make any suggestion when you type K into a new cell, because it can’t tell which option is the most similar. But when you type Kerm, Excel realizes that kerplop isn’t a candidate, and it supplies the AutoComplete suggestion Kermit. If you find AutoComplete annoying, you can get it out of your face with a mere click of the mouse. Just choose File➝Options, choose the Advanced section, and look under the “Editing options” heading for the “Enable Auto-Complete for cell values” setting. Turn this setting off to banish AutoComplete from your life.

AutoCorrect As you type text in a cell, AutoCorrect cleans up behind you—correcting things like wrongly capitalized letters and common misspellings. AutoCorrect is subtle enough that you may not even realize it’s monitoring your every move. To get a taste of its magic, look for behaviors like these: • If you type HEllo, AutoCorrect changes it to Hello. • If you type friday, AutoCorrect changes it to Friday. • If you start a sentence with a lowercase letter, AutoCorrect uppercases it. • If you scramble the letters of a common word (for example, typing thsi instead of this, or teh instead of the), AutoCorrect replaces the word with the proper spelling. • If you accidentally hit Caps Lock key, and then type jOHN sMITH when you really wanted to type John Smith, Excel not only fixes the mistake, it also switches off the Caps Lock key.

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Note: AutoCorrect doesn’t correct most misspelled words, just common typos. To correct other mistakes, use the spell checker described on page 85.

For the most part, AutoCorrect is harmless and even occasionally useful, as it can spare you from delivering minor typos in a major report. But if you need to type irregularly capitalized words, or if you have a garden-variety desire to rebel against standard English, then you can turn off some or all of the AutoCorrect actions. To reach the AutoCorrect settings, choose File➝Options. Choose the Proofing section, and then click the AutoCorrect Options button. (All Auto-Correct options are language-specific, and the title of the dialog box that opens indicates the language you’re currently using.) Most of the actions are self-explanatory, and you can turn them off by turning off their checkboxes. Figure 2-8 explains the “Replace text as you type” option, which isn’t just for errors. Figure 2-8: Under “Replace text as you type” is a long list of symbols and commonly misspelled words (the column on the left) that Excel automatically replaces with something else (the column on the right). But what if you want the copyright symbol to appear as a C in parentheses? You can remove individual corrections (select one, and then click Delete), or you can change the replacement text. And you can add your own rules. For example, you might want to be able to type PESDS and have Excel insert Patented Electronic Seltzer Delivery System. Simply type in the “Replace” and “With” text, as shown here, and then click OK.

Tip: For really advanced AutoCorrect settings, you can use the Exceptions button to define cases where Excel won’t use AutoCorrect. When you click this button, the AutoCorrect Exceptions dialog box appears with a list of exceptions. For example, this list includes abbreviations that include the period but shouldn’t be capitalized (like pp.) and words where mixed capitalization is allowed (like WordPerfect).

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AutoFill AutoFill is a quirky yet useful feature that lets you create a whole column or row of values based on just one or two cells that Excel can extrapolate into a series. Put another way, AutoFill looks at the cells you’ve already filled in a column or row, and then makes a reasonable guess about the additional cells you’ll want to add. People commonly use AutoFill for sequential numbers, months, or days. Here are a few examples of lists that AutoFill can and can’t work with: • The series 1, 2, 3, 4 is easy for Excel to interpret—it’s a list of steadily increasing numbers. The series 5, 10, 15 (numbers increasing by five) is just as easy. Both of these are great AutoFill candidates. • The series of part numbers CMP-40-0001, CMP-40-0002, CMP-40-0003 may seem more complicated because it mingles text and numbers. But clever Excel can spot the pattern, as long as the numbers are at the end of the value (so CMP40-A won’t work). • Excel readily recognizes series of months (January, February, March) and days (Sun, Mon, Tue), either written or in three-letter abbreviations. • A list of numbers like 47, 345, 6 doesn’t seem to follow a regular pattern. But by doing some analysis, Excel can guess at a relationship and generate more numbers that fit the pattern. There’s a good chance, however, that these won’t be the numbers you want, so take a close look at whatever Excel adds in cases like these. Bottom line: AutoFill is a great tool for generating simple lists. When you’re working with a complex sequence of values, it’s no help—unless you’re willing to create a custom list (page 76) that spells it out for Excel. Tip: AutoFill doubles as a quick way to copy a cell value multiple times. For example, if you select a cell in which you’ve typed Cookie Monster, you can use the AutoFill technique described below to fill every cell in that row or column with the same text.

To use AutoFill, follow these steps: 1. Fill in a couple of cells in a row or column to start off the series. Technically, you can use AutoFill if you fill in only one cell, although this approach gives Excel more room to make a mistake if you’re trying to generate a series. Of course, when you want to copy only a single cell several times, one cell is a sufficient start. 2. Select the cells you’ve entered so far. Then click (and hold) the small black square at the bottom-right corner of the selected box. You can tell that your mouse is in the correct place when the mouse pointer changes to a plus symbol (+). chapter 2: adding information to worksheets

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3. Drag the border down (if you’re filling a column of items) or to the right (if you’re filling a row of items). As you drag, a tooltip appears, showing the text that Excel is generating for each cell. While you’re dragging, you can hold down Ctrl to affect the way that Excel fills a list. When you’ve already filled in at least two cells, Ctrl tells Excel to just copy the list multiple times, rather than look for a pattern. When you want to expand a range based on just one cell, Ctrl does the opposite: It tells Excel to try to predict a pattern, rather than just copy it. When you release the mouse, Excel automatically fills in the additional cells, and a special AutoFill icon appears next to the last cell in the series, as shown in Figure 2-9. Figure 2-9: After AutoFill does its magic, Excel displays a menu that lets you fill the series without copying the formatting, or copy the formatting without filling the series. You can also choose to copy values instead of generating a list. For example, if you choose to copy values—or Copy Cells, as Excel calls it—then in the two-item series Jan, Feb, you end up with Jan, Feb, Jan, Feb, rather than Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr.

Custom AutoFill lists Excel stores a collection of AutoFill lists that it refers to every time you use the feature. You can add your own lists to the collection, which extends the series AutoFill recognizes. For example, Excel doesn’t come set to understand Kermit, Cookie Monster, Grover, Big Bird, Oscar, and Snuffleupagus as a series, but you can add it to the mix. But why bother to add custom lists to Excel’s collection? After all, if you need to type in the whole list before you use it, is AutoFill really saving you any work? The benefit occurs when you need to create the same list in multiple worksheets, in which case you can type it in just once and then use AutoFill to recreate it as often as you’d like.

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To create a custom list, follow these steps: 1. Choose File➝Options. The familiar Excel Options window appears. 2. Choose the Advanced section, scroll down to the “General” heading and, at the bottom of that section, click the Edit Custom Lists button. Here, you can take a gander at Excel’s predefined lists and add your own (Figure 2-10). Figure 2-10: Here, a new custom list of colors is being added.

3. In the “Custom lists” box on the left side of the dialog box, select NEW LIST. This action tells Excel that you’re ready to create a new list. 4. In the “List entries” box on the right side of the dialog box, type in your list. Separate each item with a comma or by pressing Enter. The list in Figure 2-10 shows a series of color names separated by commas. If you’ve already typed your list into your worksheet, you can save some work. Instead of retyping the list, click inside the text box labeled “Import list from cells.” Then, click the worksheet and drag to select the cells that contain the list. (Each item in the list must be in a separate cell, and the whole list should be in a series of adjacent cells in a single column or a single row.) When you’re finished, click Import, and Excel copies the cell entries into the new list you’re creating. 5. Click Add to store your list. At any later point in time, you can return to this dialog box, select the saved list, and modify it in the window on the right. Just click Add to commit your changes after making a change, or click Delete to remove the list entirely. chapter 2: adding information to worksheets

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6. Click OK to close the Custom Lists dialog box and OK again to close the Excel Options window. You can now start using the list with the current worksheet or in a new worksheet. Just type the first item in your list and then follow the AutoFill steps outlined in the previous section.

AutoFit Page 24 (Figure 1-5) explained how you can drag the edge of a column to resize it. For greater convenience, Excel also provides an AutoFit feature that automatically enlarges or shrinks a column to fit its content perfectly. The AutoFit feature springs into action in three situations: • When you type a number or date that’s too wide to fit into a cell, Excel automatically widens the column to accommodate the new content. (Excel doesn’t automatically expand columns when you type in text, however.) • If you double-click the right edge of a column header, Excel automatically sizes the column to fit the widest entry it contains. This trick works for all types of data, including dates, numbers, and text. • If you choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝AutoFit Column Width, Excel automatically sizes the column to fit the content in the current cell. Or you can select a group of cells (see page 95) and use this command to size the column to fit the widest value in the group. This feature is helpful if you have a column that’s made up of relatively narrow entries but also has a long column title. In this situation, you may not want to expand the column to the full width of the title. Instead, you may wish to size the column to fit the contents and allow the title to spill over to the next column. While AutoFit automatically widens columns when you type in a number or date in a cell, you can still shrink a column after you’ve entered your information. Keep in mind, however, that when your columns are too narrow, Excel displays the cell data differently, depending on the type of information. When your cells contain text, it’s entirely possible for one cell to overlap (and thereby obscure) another, a problem first described in Chapter 1. However, if Excel allowed truncated numbers, it could be deceiving. For example, if you squash a cell with the price of espresso makers so that they appear to cost $2 (instead of $200), you might wind up ordering a costly gift for all your coworkers. To prevent this problem, Excel never truncates a number or date. Instead, if you’ve shrunk a cell’s width so that the number can’t fit, you’ll see a series of number signs (like #####) filling in the whole cell. This warning is just Excel’s way of telling you that you’re out of space. Once you enlarge the column by hand (or by using AutoFit), the original number reappears. (Until then, you can still see the number stored in the cell by moving to the cell and looking in the formula bar.)

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A Few More Ways to Adjust Column Width Excel gives you the ability to precisely control column widths. To change the width of a column, right-click the column header at the top of the column, and then choose Column Width. The standard unadjusted column size is a compact 8.43 characters, but you can change that to any number of characters. (Remember that because different fonts use different size letters, the number of characters you specify here may not correspond directly to the number of characters in your column.)

You can also adjust multiple column widths at the same time. Just select multiple columns (click the first column header, and then drag to the left or to the right to select more columns). Now, when you apply a new width, Excel uses it for all the selected columns. Finally, you can customize the standard width for columns, which is the width that Excel assigns to columns in every new worksheet that you create. To set the standard width, choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Default Width from the menu, and then change the number.

Dealing with Change: Undo, Redo, and AutoRecover While editing a worksheet, an Excel guru can make as many (or more) mistakes as a novice. These mistakes include copying cells to the wrong place, deleting something important, or just making a mess of the cell formatting. Excel masters can recover much more quickly, however, because they rely on Undo and Redo. Get in the habit of calling on these features, and you’ll be well on your way to Excel gurudom.

Undo and Redo As you create your worksheet, Excel records every change you make. Because the modern computer has vast resources of extra memory and computing power (that is, when it’s not running the latest three-dimensional real-time action game), Excel can keep this log without slowing your computer down one bit. If you make a change to your worksheet that you don’t like (say you inadvertently delete your company’s entire payroll plan), you can use Excel’s Undo history to reverse the change. In the Quick Access toolbar, simply click the Undo button (Figure 2-11), or press the super-useful keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z. Excel immediately restores your worksheet to its state just before the last change. If you change your mind again, you can revert to the changed state (known to experts as “undoing your undo”) by choosing Edit➝Redo, or pressing Ctrl+Y.

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Figure 2-11: Left: When you hover over the Undo button, you see a text description for the most recent action, which is what you’ll undo if you click away. Here, the text Hello has just been typed into a cell, as Excel explains. Right: Click the downpointing arrow on the edge of the Undo button to see a history of all your recent actions, from most recent (top) to oldest (bottom). If you click an item that’s down the list, you’ll perform a megaundo operation that undoes all the selected actions. In this example, three actions are about to be rolled back—the text entry in cell B2, and a style and format operation that changed the number format and background fill of cell A2.

Things get interesting when you want to go farther back than just one previous change, because Excel doesn’t just store one change in memory. Instead, it tracks the last 100 actions you made. And it tracks just about anything you do to a worksheet, including cell edits, cell formatting, cut and paste operations, and much more. As a result, if you make a series of changes you don’t like, or if you discover a mistake a little later down the road, you can step back through the entire series of changes, one at a time. Every time you press Ctrl+Z, you go back one change in the history. This ability to reverse multiple changes makes Undo one of the most valuable features ever added to any software package. Note: The Undo feature means you don’t need to be afraid of performing a change that may not be what you want. Excel experts often try out new actions, and then simply reverse them if the actions don’t have the desired effect.

The Undo feature raises an interesting dilemma. When you can go back 100 levels into the history of your document, how do you know exactly what changes you’re reversing? Most people don’t remember the previous 100 changes they made to a

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worksheet, which makes it all too easy to reverse a change you actually want to keep. Excel provides the solution by not only keeping track of old worksheet versions, but also by keeping a simple description of each change. You don’t see this description if you use the Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y shortcuts. However, when you hover over the button in the Quick Access toolbar, you’ll see the action you’re undoing listed there. For example, consider what happens if you type hello into cell A1 and then clear the cell by pressing the Delete key. Now, when you hover over the Undo button in the Quick Access toolbar, it says “Undo Clear (Ctrl+Z)”. If you click Undo, the word hello returns. And if you hover over the Undo button again, it now says, “Undo Typing ‘hello’ in A2 (Ctrl+Z)”, as shown in Figure 2-11, left. Incidentally, Excel doesn’t clear the Undo history when you save your spreadsheet. Instead, the Undo history remains until you close your workbook. Note: Very rarely, when you perform an advanced analysis task with an extremely complex worksheet, Excel may decide it can’t afford to keep an old version of your worksheet in memory. When Excel hits this point, it warns you before you make the change, and gives you the chance to either cancel the edit or continue (without the possibility of undoing the change). In this rare situation, you may want to cancel the change, save your worksheet as a backup, and then continue.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Using Repeat to Automate Repetitive Tasks Redo is commonly used to reverse an Undo. In other words, if you cancel an action and then change your mind, you can use Redo to quickly reapply the change. But Redo also has a much more interesting relative called Repeat, which lets you repeat any action multiple times. The neat thing is that you can repeat this action on other cells. For example, imagine you hit Ctrl+B to change a cell to bold. If you move to another cell and hit Ctrl+Y, Excel repeats your operation and applies the bold formatting to the new cell. In this case, you’re not saving much effort, because it’s just as easy to use Ctrl+B or Ctrl+Y. However, imagine you finish an operation that applies a set of sophisticated formatting changes to a cell. For example, say you go to the Home➝Font section of the ribbon, click the dialog launcher to get to the Format Cells dialog box, and then increase the font size, bold the text, and apply a border around the cell. (Chapter 5 tells you how to do these things.) Now,

when you move to another cell and press Ctrl+Y, Excel applies all the changes at once—which is much easier than calling up the Format Cells dialog box again and selecting the same options. The trick when using Repeat is to make sure you don’t perform another action until you’ve finished repeating your changes. For example, if you make some formatting changes and then stop to delete an incorrect cell value, then you can no longer use Repeat to apply your formatting because Excel applies the last change that you made—in this case, clearing the cell. (Of course, when you mistakenly apply Repeat, you can always call on Undo to get out of the mess.) If you’re ever in doubt about what will happen when you use Repeat, just hover over the Undo button in the Quick Access toolbar. You’ll see a text description, like Undo Font or Undo Format Cells, which describes your last action.

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AutoRecover Undo and Redo are undeniably useful. However, there’s another data-saving trick that just might save your sanity (and your job) if you need it in a pinch: AutoRecover. In Chapter 1, you learned how AutoRecover can help you out in the event of catastrophic failure—for example, if Excel crashes or your computer loses power. In this situation, Excel will present you with your automatically backed-up work the next time you start the program. However, you can also use AutoRecover when the problem is your fault—for example, if you’ve just realized that you wiped out a critical column of numbers 20 minutes ago while editing your spreadsheet. In this situation, you can open one of the automatically saved versions of your spreadsheet in a separate Excel window. You can then find the missing or modified data and copy it back to the current version of your spreadsheet. Or, if you’ve really made a mess of things, you can revert to the older version with a single click. Tip: AutoRecover is perfect in situations where Undo isn’t enough—for example, if the change was made long ago and isn’t in the Undo history anymore, or if you don’t want to reverse every change you’ve made since that mistake in order to fix the problem.

To see the AutoRecover files for your current workbook, choose File➝Info. Excel switches into backstage view and shows three sections and three big buttons (Figure 2-12). The bottom section is named Versions, and it lists all the automatically saved copies of your work. Figure 2-12: As long as you’re making changes, Excel will continue making automatic backups according to the AutoRecover settings you’ve configured (page 54). If you’re using the standard AutoRecover settings, Excel will create a new backup as often as every 10 minutes. Here, there are three previous versions of the current workbook. Backups are listed from most recent to oldest and identified by the time they were made.

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To take a look at an AutoRecover backup, just click the file you want in the Versions list. Excel opens the backup in a new window, but it adds a helpful warning to make sure you don’t confuse it with the current version of the file (Figure 2-13). Figure 2-13: The yellow bar at the top of the worksheet indicates that this is an autosaved version of the file. You can copy data from this window to the window with your current version, or you can click Restore to abandon your current version and use this in its place.

Ordinarily, Excel deletes AutoRecover files when you close the workbook. However, there’s one significant exception: If you close a workbook without saving it, the AutoRecover version will remain stored on your computer. To get it back, open the file again and look at the list of old Versions (choose File➝Info, as shown in Figure 2-12). There will be just one backed-up copy, with the note “(when I closed without saving)” next to its name. This is the version of your spreadsheet that you didn’t save. Interestingly, if you start a new workbook, work on it long enough for Excel to create an AutoRecover backup, and then exit without saving it, the AutoRecover file will still remain, even though you haven’t saved your work even once. A similar thing happens if you open a file, edit it for a while, and close it without saving your changes. Excel calls this sort of file a draft, and you can dig it up later out of the recent files list (choose File➝Recent). To dig it up later, choose File➝Info, click the Manage Versions button, and choose Recover Unsaved Workbooks. An Open dialog box appears with a list of drafts (Figure 2-14).

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Figure 2-14: Here, Excel is currently storing three unsaved workbooks. The file name is the name Excel originally gave the new document (like Book1), followed by a unique string of numbers. To open one, select it and click Open.

You shouldn’t depend on Excel to keep copies of unsaved work. After all, the AutoRecover file is a temporary backup, and Excel can delete it at any time. Instead, the AutoRecover is an emergency measure that’s there to bail you out if you make a serious blunder. For example, almost every Excel guru has a horror story that usually runs like this: “It was 3:00 a.m., and I had just finished a long bout of number crunching. I had eight Excel windows opened at once, so I could scratch down different calculations as I worked. Relieved that my job was done, I saved my file, closed the program, and hit Don’t Save a few times to get rid of my temporary work—only to realize there was another new spreadsheet with the company financials, and I’d just banished it into oblivion.” Fortunately, you won’t face this nightmare. If you act fast, you’ll find that your abandoned file is still available in the recent files list. Note: Excel files usually aren’t that big, so you don’t need to worry about drafts cluttering up your computer’s hard drive. However, if you want to clear them out anyway, choose File➝Info, click the big Versions button, and choose Delete All Draft Versions.

Incidentally, Excel stores its AutoRecover backups in a specific location, based on the person currently logged on to the computer. For example, if you’re logged in as cindy_k in Windows Vista or Windows 7, your AutoRecover backups are stored in a folder like C:\Users\cindy_k\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel. (Excel creates a separate folder there for each workbook, so each workbook can keep its own

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carefully separated set of backups.) Drafts—the AutoRecover files for workbooks that have never been saved—are stored in a folder like C:\Users\cindy_k\AppData\ Roaming\Microsoft\DraftFiles. You can change this location and other AutoRecover settings by choosing File➝Options, and then choosing the Save category. Page 54 has a detailed description of AutoRecover settings.

Spell Check A spell checker in Excel? Is that supposed to be for people who can’t spell 138 correctly? The fact is that more and more people are cramming text—column headers, boxes of commentary, lists of favorite cereal combinations—into their spreadsheets. And Excel’s designers have graciously responded by providing the very same spell checker that you’ve probably used with Microsoft Word. As you might expect, Excel’s spell checker examines only text as it sniffs its way through a spreadsheet. To start the spell checker, follow these simple steps: 1. Move to where you want to start the spell check. If you want to check the entire worksheet from start to finish, move to the first cell. Otherwise, move to the location where you want to start checking. Or, if you want to check a portion of the worksheet, select the cells you want to check. Excel’s spell check can check only one worksheet at a time. 2. Choose Review➝Proofing➝Spelling, or press F7. The Excel spell checker starts working immediately, starting with the current cell and moving to the right, going from column to column. After it finishes the last column of the current row, checking continues with the first column of the next row. If you don’t start at the first cell (A1) in your worksheet, Excel asks you when it reaches the end of the worksheet whether it should continue checking from the beginning of the sheet. If you say yes, it checks the remaining cells and stops when it reaches your starting point (having made a complete pass through all of your cells). When the spell check finishes, a dialog box informs you that all cells have been checked. If your cells pass the spell check, this dialog box is the only feedback you receive. On the other hand, if Excel discovers any potential spelling errors during its check, it displays a Spelling window, as shown in Figure 2-15, showing the offending word and a list of suggestions.

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Figure 2-15: When Excel encounters a word it thinks is misspelled, it displays the Spelling window. The cell containing the word—but not the actual word itself—gets highlighted with a black border. Excel doesn’t let you edit your spreadsheet while the Spelling window is active. However, if you don’t see the word you want in the list of suggestions, you can type a replacement in the “Not in Dictionary” box and click Change.

The Spelling window offers a wide range of choices. If you want to use the list of suggestions to perform a correction, you have three options: • Click one of the words in the list of suggestions, and then click Change to replace your text with the proper spelling. Double-clicking the word has the same effect. • Click one of the words in the list of suggestions, and click Change All to replace your text with the proper spelling. If Excel finds the same mistake elsewhere in your worksheet, it repeats the change automatically. • Click one of the words in the list of suggestions, and click AutoCorrect. Excel makes the change for this cell and for any other similarly misspelled words. In addition, Excel adds the correction to its AutoCorrect list (described on page 73). That means if you type the same unrecognized word into another cell (or even another workbook), Excel automatically corrects your entry. This option is useful if you’ve discovered a mistake that you frequently make.

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Tip: If Excel spots an error but it doesn’t give you the correct spelling in its list of suggestions, just type the correction into the “Not in Dictionary” box and hit Enter. Excel then inserts your correction into the corresponding cell.

On the other hand, if Excel is warning you about a word that doesn’t represent a mistake (like your company name or some specialized term), you can click one of the following buttons: • Ignore Once skips the word and continues the spell check. If the same word appears elsewhere in your spreadsheet, Excel prompts you again to make a correction. • Ignore All skips the current word and all other instances of that word throughout your spreadsheet. You might use Ignore All to force Excel to disregard something you don’t want to correct, like a person’s name. The nice thing about Ignore All is that Excel doesn’t prompt you again if it finds the same name, but it does prompt you again if it finds a different spelling (for example, if you misspelled the name). • Add to Dictionary adds the word to Excel’s custom dictionary. Adding a word is great if you plan to keep using a word that’s not in Excel’s dictionary. (For example, a company name makes a good addition to the custom dictionary.) Not only does Excel ignore any occurrences of this word, but if it finds a similar but slightly different variation of that word, it provides the custom word in its list of suggestions. Even better, Excel uses the custom dictionary in every workbook you spell check. • Cancel stops the operation altogether. You can then correct the cell manually (or do nothing) and resume the spell check later.

Spell Checking Options Excel lets you tweak how the spell checker works by letting you change a few basic options that control things like the language used and which, if any, custom dictionaries Excel examines. To set these options (or just to take a look at them), choose File➝ Options, and then select the Proofing section (Figure 2-16). You can also reach these options by clicking the Spelling window’s Options button while a spell check is underway. The most important spell check setting is the language (at the bottom of the window), which determines what dictionary Excel uses. Depending on the version of Excel that you’re using and the choices you made while installing the software, you might be using one or more languages during a spell check operation.

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Other Proofing Tools Spreadsheet spell checking is a useful proofing tool. But Excel doesn’t stop there. It piles on a few more questionable extras to help you enhance your workbooks. Along with the spellchecker, Excel offers the following goodies. All of them require an Internet connection. • Research. Click Review➝Proofing➝Research button to open a Research window, which appears on the right side of the Excel window, and lets you retrieve all kinds of information from the Web. The Research window provides a small set of Internet-driven services, including the ability to search a dictionary for a detailed definition, look in the Encarta encyclopedia, or get a delayed stock market quote from MSN Money. Page 690 has more.

• Thesaurus. Itching to promulgate your prodigious prolixity? (Translation: wanna use big words?) The thesaurus can help you take ordinary language and transform it into clear-as-mud jargon. Or, it can help you track down a synonym that’s on the edge of your tongue. Either way, use this tool with care. To get started, click Review➝Proofing➝Thesaurus. • Translate. Click this button to translate words or short phrases from one language to another. Behind the scenes, a free web service (like www.worldlingo. com) does the actual translation work. To try it out, click Review➝Language➝Translate.

Figure 2-16: The spell checker options allow you to specify the language and a few other miscellaneous settings. This figure shows the standard settings that Excel uses when you first install it.

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• Ignore words that contain numbers. If you choose this option, Excel won’t check words that contain numeric characters, like Sales43 or H3ll0. If you don’t choose this option, then Excel flags these entries as errors unless you’ve specifically added them to the custom dictionary. • Ignore Internet and file addresses. If you choose this option, Excel ignores words that appear to be file paths (like C:\Documents and Settings) or website addresses (like http://FreeSweatSocks.com). • Flag repeated words. If you choose this option, Excel treats the same words appearing consecutively (“the the”) as an error. • Suggest from main dictionary only. If you choose this option, the spell checker doesn’t suggest words from the custom dictionary. However, it still accepts a word that matches one of the custom dictionary entries. You can also choose the file Excel uses to store custom words—the unrecognized words that you add to the dictionary while a spell check is underway. Excel automatically creates a file named custom.dic for you to use, but you might want to use another file if you’re sharing someone else’s custom dictionary. (You can use more than one custom dictionary at a time. If you do, Excel combines them all to get one list of custom words.) Or, you might want to edit the list of words if you’ve mistakenly added something that shouldn’t be there. To perform any of these tasks, click the Custom Dictionaries button, which opens the Custom Dictionaries dialog box (Figure 2-17). From this dialog box, you can remove your custom dictionary, change it, or add a new one. Figure 2-17: Excel starts you off with a custom dictionary named custom.dic (shown here). To add an existing custom dictionary, click Add and browse to the file. Or, click New to create a new, blank custom dictionary. You can also edit the list of words a dictionary contains (select it and click Edit Word List). Figure 2-18 shows an example of dictionary editing.

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Figure 2-18: This custom dictionary is fairly modest. It contains three names and an unusual word. Excel lists the words in alphabetical order. You can add a new word directly from this window (type in the text and click Add), remove one (select it and click Delete), or go nuclear and remove them all (click Delete All).

Note: All custom dictionaries are ordinary text files with the extension .dic. Unless you tell it otherwise, Excel assumes that custom dictionaries are located in a folder named AppData\Roaming\UProof inside the folder Windows uses for user-specific settings. For example, if you’re using Windows Vista or Windows 7 and you’re logged in under the user account Brad_Pitt, you’d find the custom dictionary in the C:\Users\ Brad_Pitt\AppData\Roaming\UProof folder.

Adding Hyperlinks Web browsers aren’t the only programs that use hyperlinks—the underlined pieces of text that let you easily travel around the Web. In fact browsers weren’t even the first. (Most believe that honor goes to the ambitious, 1960s-era cataloging project called Xanadu, which was never finished.) You may be surprised to find out that hyperlinks are quite useful in Excel, letting you link together different types of content and even navigate large spreadsheets. Here are three common examples: • You can create a hyperlink to a web page. In this case, Excel opens your web browser in a new window and points it to the appropriate page. • You can create a hyperlink to a different type of file. You can link to a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation, among other things. In this case, Excel opens whatever program is registered on your computer to handle this type of file. If you have a link to a .doc or .docx file and have Word installed, Excel opens a new Word window to display the document. • You can create a hyperlink to another worksheet or another part of the current spreadsheet. This technique is helpful if you have a large amount of data and you want the people using your workbook to be able to quickly jump to the important places. In Excel, you can place a maximum of one hyperlink in each cell.

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Tip: Excel can create web page hyperlinks automatically. If you type some text that clearly corresponds to a web address (like text that starts with “http://” or “www.”), Excel converts it to a hyperlink. When you’re done typing, a smart tag appears, which you can click to undo this automatic adjustment and convert the cell back to ordinary text.

Creating a Link to a Web Page or Document To insert a hyperlink into a cell, follow these steps: 1. Move to the cell where you want to place the hyperlink. 2. Choose Insert➝Links➝Hyperlink (or press the shortcut key Ctrl+K). The Insert Hyperlink dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2-19. Figure 2-19: In this example, someone’s about to create a new hyperlink. It’ll appear in the worksheet with the text “Click here for company information” (which, of course, you can edit to say anything you want) and will take the clicker to the website www. prosetech.com.

Tip: You can also create a hyperlink on a picture object, so that the web page opens when you click the image. To do so, right-click the picture box, choose Hyperlink, and then continue with step 3. (For help inserting the picture in the first place, see Chapter 19.)

3. Click the Existing File or Web Page option on the left side of the dialog box. You can also use the Create New Document option to create and link to a new file in one step. The trick is that you need to remember to add the correct file extension. If you want to create a new Word document, you need to make sure you add .docx to the end of the file name so Windows knows what program to use for viewing and editing the file. If you want, select the “Edit this document now” option to open the file immediately in the appropriate program.

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4. At the top of the dialog box, in the “Text to display” text box, enter whatever you would like the link to say. Common choices for the text include the actual web address (like www.mycompany.com) or a descriptive message (like “Click here to go to my company’s Website”). If the current cell already contains text, that text appears in the “Text to display” text box. If you change it, the new text replaces the current cell contents. 5. If you want to set a custom tooltip for this hyperlink, click the ScreenTip button. Type in your message and click OK (see Figure 2-20). A custom tooltip is a little message-bearing window that appears above a hyperlink when your mouse pointer hovers over the link. If you don’t specify a custom tooltip, Excel shows the full path or URL. Figure 2-20: A tooltip appears telling you the target web address, file path, or worksheet location. Optionally, you can replace this tooltip with a custom message when you create or edit the hyperlink.

6. If you want to add a link to a document, then browse to the appropriate file and select it. If you want to add a link to a web page, type the URL address into the Address text box. If you’re adding a link to a document, Excel sets the address to the full file path, as in C:\MyDocuments\Resume.doc. You can type this path in manually, and if your network supports it, you can use UNC (Universal Naming Convention) paths that point to a file on another computer using the name of the computer, as in \\SalesComputer\Documents\CompanyPolicy.doc. Note: You’re free to use files on your computer or those that are stored on network drives. Just remember that when you click the link, Excel looks in the exact location you’ve specified. That means if you move the target file to a new location, or you open the worksheet on another computer, Excel won’t be able to find it.

7. Click OK to insert the hyperlink. When you insert a hyperlink, Excel formats the cell with blue lettering and adds an underline, so it looks like a web browser hyperlink. However, you can reformat the cell to change its appearance by selecting Home➝Font section of the ribbon.

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To use a hyperlink, just click it. You’ll notice that the mouse pointer changes to a pointing hand as soon as you move over the hyperlink. If you want to move to a cell that contains a hyperlink without activating it, you can use the arrow keys, or you can click and hold the cell for about one second.

Creating a Link to a Worksheet Location Hyperlinks also make for helpful navigational aids. If you have a worksheet with multiple tables of data, you can use a hyperlink to jump to a specific cell. If you create a spreadsheet that splits its data over multiple worksheets (a trick you’ll pick up in Chapter 4), you can use a hyperlink to jump from worksheet to worksheet. To create a hyperlink that uses a worksheet location as its target, follow these steps: 1. Make note of the location you want to use for your target. A worksheet hyperlink points to a specific cell. If you’re a bit more advanced, you can create a link that moves to a new worksheet. For example, the reference Sheet2!A1 moves to cell A1 in Sheet2. (To learn more about worksheets and how to create them, see Chapter 4.) If you’re feeling really slick, you can create a link that points to a named cell reference—a descriptive cell shortcut that you create and name. (To learn how to create a named cell reference, see page 371.) 2. Move to the cell where you want to place the hyperlink. 3. Choose Insert➝Links➝Hyperlink (or press the shortcut key Ctrl+K). The Insert Hyperlink dialog box appears. 4. Click the “Place in This Document” option on the left side of the dialog box. Excel displays a tree that represents the layout of the current workbook. When you link to another location in the workbook, you need to supply a cell reference (see Figure 2-21). 5. If you want to jump to another worksheet, select the worksheet from the list. All the worksheet names in your workbook appear under the Cell Reference heading. 6. Type in the cell reference in the “Type the cell reference” text box. Excel jumps to this location when somebody clicks the link. 7. At the top of the dialog box, in the “Text to display” text box, enter whatever you would like the link to say. Dealer’s choice here.

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Figure 2-21: Excel gives you a convenient tree that represents your workbook. You can choose any of the worksheets in your workbook, or you can choose a predefined named range (page 371).

8. If you want to set a custom tooltip for this hyperlink, then click the ScreenTip button. Type in your message and click OK. 9. Click OK to insert the hyperlink. Admire your handiwork. Tip: To edit a hyperlink, just move to the cell and choose Insert➝Links➝Hyperlink again (or press Ctrl+K). The same window appears, although now it has the title Edit Hyperlink.

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imple spreadsheets are a good way to get a handle on Excel. But in the real world, you often need a spreadsheet that’s more sophisticated—one that can grow and change as you start to track more information. For example, on the expenses worksheet you created in Chapter 1, perhaps you’d like to add information about which stores you’ve been shopping in. Or maybe you’d like to swap the order in which your columns appear. To make changes like these, you need to add a few more skills to your Excel repertoire. This chapter covers the basics of spreadsheet modification, including how to select cells, how to move data from one place to another, and how to change the structure of your worksheet. What you learn here will make you a master of spreadsheet manipulation.

Selecting Cells First things first: Before you can make any changes to an existing worksheet, you need to select the cells you want to modify. Happily, selecting cells in Excel—try saying that five times fast—is easy. You can do it many different ways, and it’s worth learning them all. Different selection techniques come in handy in different situations, and if you master all of them in conjunction with the formatting features described in Chapter 5, you’ll be able to transform the look of any worksheet in seconds.

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kind of rectangle), as shown in Figure 3-1. The easiest way to select a continuous range is to click the top-left cell you want to select. Then drag to the right (to select more columns) or down (to select more rows). As you go, Excel highlights the selected cells in blue. Once you’ve highlighted all the cells you want, release the mouse button. Now you can perform an action, like copying the cells’ contents, formatting the cells, or pasting new values into the selected cells. Figure 3-1: Top: The three selected cells (A1, B1, and C1) cover the column titles. Bottom: This selection covers the nine cells that make up the rest of the worksheet. Notice that Excel doesn’t highlight the first cell you select. In fact, Excel knows you’ve selected it (as you can see by the thick black border that surrounds it), but it has a white background to indicate that it’s the active cell. When you start typing, Excel inserts your text in this cell.

In the simple expense worksheet from Chapter 1, for example, you could first select the cells in the top row and then apply bold formatting to make the column titles stand out. (Once you’ve selected the top three cells, press Ctrl+B, or chose Home➝Font➝Bold.) Note: When you select some cells and then press an arrow key or click into another cell before you perform any action, Excel clears your selection.

You have a few useful shortcuts for making continuous range selections (some of these are illustrated in Figure 3-2): • Instead of clicking and dragging to select a range, you can use a two-step technique. First, click the top-left cell. Then hold down Shift and click the cell at the bottom-right corner of the area you want to select. Excel highlights all the cells in between automatically. This technique works even if both cells aren’t visible at the same time; just scroll to the second cell using the scroll bars, and make sure you don’t click any other cell on your way there. • If you want to select an entire column, click the header at the top of the column (as shown in Figure 3-2). For example, if you want to select the second column, then click the gray “B” box above the column. Excel selects all the cells in this column, right down to row 1,048,576. • If you want to select an entire row, click the numbered row header on the left edge of the row. For example, you can select the second row by clicking the gray “2” box to the left of the row. All the columns in this row will be selected.

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Figure 3-2: Top: Click a column header to select that entire column. Middle: Click a row number to select that entire row. Bottom: To select every cell in the worksheet, click the gray box near the top-left corner of the worksheet (circled).

• If you want to select multiple adjacent columns, click the leftmost column header and then drag to the right until all the columns you want are selected. As you drag, a tooltip appears indicating how many columns you’ve selected. For example, if you’ve selected three columns, you’ll see a tooltip with the text 3C (C stands for “column”). • If you want to select multiple adjacent rows, click the topmost row header and then drag down until all the rows you want are selected. As you drag, a tooltip appears indicating how many rows you’ve selected. For example, if you’ve selected two rows, you’ll see a tooltip with the text 2R (R stands for “row”). • If you want to select all the cells in the entire worksheet, click the blank gray box that’s just outside the top-left corner of the worksheet. This box is immediately to the left of the column headers and just above the row headers.

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Tip: When you’re selecting multiple rows or columns, make sure you click between the column header’s left and right edges, not on either edge. When you click the edge of the column header, you end up resizing the column instead of making a selection.

TIME-SAVING TIP

A Truly Great Calculation Trick Excel provides a seriously nifty calculation tool in the status bar. Just select two or more cells and look down to the status bar, where you’ll see the number of cells you’ve selected (the count) along with their sum and their average (shown in Figure 3-3). To choose what calculations appear in the status bar, rightclick anywhere on the status bar and then, in the menu that appears, choose one of the following options: • Average. The average of all the selected numbers or dates. • Count. The number of selected cells that aren’t blank. • Numerical Count. The number of selected cells that contain numbers or dates. • Minimum. The selected number or date with the smallest value (for dates this means the earliest date).

• Maximum. The selected number or date with the largest value (for dates this means the latest date). • Sum. The sum of all selected numbers. Although you can use Sum with date values, because of the way Excel stores date values, adding dates together generates meaningless results. Most of the status bar calculations don’t work properly if you select both date and numeric information. For example, when you’re attempting to add up a list of numbers and dates, Excel computes the value using both date values—which it stores internally as numbers, as explained on page 70—and the ordinary numbers; Excel then displays the final count using the formatting of the first selected cell. That adds up, alas, to a number that doesn’t really mean anything.

Figure 3-3: The nicest detail about the status bar’s quick calculations is that you can mix and match several at a time. Here, you see the count, average, and sum of the selected cells.

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Making Noncontiguous Selections In some cases, you may want to select cells that are noncontiguous (also known as nonadjacent), which means they don’t form a neat rectangle. For example, you might want to select columns A and C, but not column B. Or you might want to select a handful of cells scattered throughout the worksheet. The trick to noncontiguous cell selection is using the Ctrl key. All you need to do is select the cells you want while holding down Ctrl. You can select individual cells by Ctrl-clicking them, or you can select multiple blocks of cells on different parts of the sheet by clicking and dragging in several different places while holding down Ctrl. You can also combine the Ctrl key with any of the shortcuts discussed earlier to select entire columns or rows as a part of your selection. Excel highlights in blue the cells you select (except for the last cell selected, which, as shown in Figure 3-4, isn’t highlighted because it becomes the active cell).

Figure 3-4: This figure shows a noncontiguous selection that includes four cells (A1, B2, C3, and B4). The last selected cell (B4) isn’t highlighted because it’s the active cell. This behavior is a little bit different from a continuous selection, in which the first selected cell is always the active cell. With a noncontiguous selection, the last selected cell becomes the active cell. Either way, the active cell is still a part of the selection.

Automatically Selecting Your Data Excel provides a nifty shortcut that can help you select a series of cells without dragging or Shift-clicking anything. It’s called AutoSelect, and its special power is to select all the data values in a given row or column until it encounters an empty cell. To use AutoSelect, follow these steps: 1. Move to the first cell that you want to select. Before continuing, decide which direction you want to extend the selection.

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2. Hold down Shift. Double-click whichever edge of the active cell corresponds to the direction you want to AutoSelect. For example, if you want to select the cells below the active cell, then doubleclick its bottom edge. (You’ll know you’re in the right place when the mouse pointer changes to a four-way arrow.) 3. Excel completes your selection automatically. AutoSelection selects every cell in the direction you choose until it reaches the first blank cell. The blank cell (and any cells beyond it) won’t be selected.

Making Selections with the Keyboard The mouse can be an intuitive way to navigate around a worksheet and select cells. It can also be a tremendous time-suck, especially for nimble-fingered typists who’ve grown fond of the keyboard shortcuts that let them speed through actions in other programs. Fortunately, Excel is ready to let you use the keyboard to select cells in a worksheet. Just follow these steps: 1. Start by moving to the first cell you want to select. Whichever cell you begin on becomes the anchor point from which your selected area grows. Think of this cell as the corner of a rectangle you’re about to draw. 2. Hold down Shift and move to the right or left (to select columns) and down or up (to select more rows), using the arrow keys. As you move, the selection grows. Instead of holding down Shift, you can also just press F8 once, which turns on extend mode. When extend mode is on, you’ll see the text Extend Selection in the status bar. As you move, Excel selects cells just as though you were holding down Shift. You can turn off extend mode by pressing F8 once you’ve finished marking your range. Tip: If you really want to perform some selection magic, you can throw in one of Excel’s powerful keyboard shortcuts. Use Ctrl+Space to select an entire column or Shift+Space to select the entire row. Or use the remarkable Ctrl+Shift+Space, which selects a block that includes the current cell and all the nearby contiguous cells (stopping only at the edges where it finds a blank cell). Finally, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+Space twice in a row to select the entire worksheet.

Making a noncontiguous selection is almost as easy. The trick is you need to switch between extend mode and another mode called add mode. Just follow these steps: 1. Move to the first cell you want to select. You can add cells to a noncontiguous range one at a time or add multiple continuous ranges. Either way, you start with the first cell you want to select.

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2. Press F8. This key turns on extend mode. You’ll see the text Extend Selection appear in the Status bar to let you know extend mode is turned on. 3. If you want to select more than one cell, use the arrow keys to extend your selection. If you just want to select the currently active cell, do nothing; you’re ready to go onto the next step. When you want to add a whole block of cells, you can mark out your selection now. Remember, at this point you’re still selecting a continuous range. In the steps that follow, you can add several distinct continuous ranges to make a noncontiguous selection. 4. Press Shift+F8 to add the highlighted cells to your noncontiguous range. When you hit Shift+F8, you switch to add mode, and you see the text “Add to Selection” appear in the status bar. 5. You now have two choices: You can repeat steps 1 to 4 to add more cells to your selection, or you can perform an action with the current selection, like applying new formatting. You can repeat steps 1 to 4 as many times as necessary to add more groups of cells to your noncontiguous range. These new cells (either individuals or groups) don’t need to be near each other or in any way connected to the other cells you’ve selected. If you change your mind and decide you don’t want to do anything with your selection after all, press F8 twice—once to move back into extend mode and then again to return to normal mode. Now, the next time you press an arrow key, Excel releases the current selection. POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Selecting Cells with the Go To Feature In Chapter 1 (on page 28), you learned how you could use the Go To feature to jump from one position in a cell to another. A little-known Excel secret also allows you to use the Go To feature to select a range of cells.

Type in the address of the bottom-right cell in the selection you want to highlight. Now, here’s the secret: Hold down Shift when you click the OK button. This action tells Excel to select the range of cells as it moves to the new cell.

It works like this: Start off at the top-left cell of the range you want to select. Then, open the Go To window by selecting Home➝Editing➝Find & Select➝Go To or pressing Ctrl+G.

For example, if you start in cell A1 and use the Go To window to jump to B3, then you’ll select a block of six cells: A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, and B3.

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Tip: You can also use the keyboard to activate AutoSelect. Just hold down the Shift key and use one of the shortcut key combinations that automatically jumps over a range of cells. For example, when you hold down Shift and then press Ctrl+�, you’ll automatically jump to the last occupied cell in the current row with all the cells in between selected. For more information about the shortcut keys, refer to Table 1-1 on page 27.

Moving Cells Around One of the most common reasons to select groups of cells on a worksheet is to copy or move them from one place to another. Excel is a champion of the basic cut-andpaste feature, and it also gives you worthwhile enhancements that let you do things like drag and drop blocks of cells and copy multiple selections to the clipboard at the same time. Before you get started shuffling data from one place to another, here are a few points to keep in mind: • Excel lets you cut or copy a single cell or a continuous range of cells. Ordinarily, when you cut or copy a cell, everything goes with it, including the data and the current formatting. However, Excel also has tricks that let you copy data without formatting (or even just the formatting). You’ll learn about those on page 106. • When you paste cells onto your worksheet, you have two basic choices. You can paste the cells into a new, blank area of the worksheet, or you can paste the cells in a place that already contains data. In this second case, Excel overwrites the existing cells with the new pasted data. • Cutting and copying cells works almost exactly the same way. The only difference you’ll see is that when you perform a cut-and-paste operation (as opposed to a copy-and-paste operation), Excel erases the source data once the operation is complete. However, Excel doesn’t remove the source cells from the worksheet. Instead, it just leaves them empty. (Page 115 shows you what to do if you do want to remove or insert cells, not just the data they contain.)

A Simple Cut-and-Paste or Copy-and-Paste Here’s the basic procedure for any cut-and-paste or copy-and-paste operation: 1. Select the cells you want to cut or copy. You can use any of the tricks you learned in the previous section to highlight a continuous range of cells. (You can’t cut and paste noncontiguous selections.) When you want to cut or copy only a single cell, just move to the cell—you don’t actually need to select it.

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2. If you want to cut your selection, choose Home➝Clipboard➝Cut (or Ctrl+X). When you want to copy your selection, choose Home➝Clipboard➝Copy (or Ctrl+C). Excel highlights your selection with a marquee border (Figure 3-5), so called because the border blinks like the twinkling lights around an old-style movie theater marquee. At the same time, the text “Select destination and press ENTER or choose Paste” appears in the Status bar (if it fits).

Figure 3-5: In this example, cells A1 to A4 have been copied. The next step is to move to the place where you want to paste the cells and then press Enter to complete the operation. Excel treats cut and copy operations in the same way. In both cases, the selection remains on the spreadsheet, surrounded by the marquee border. When you perform a cut operation, Excel doesn’t empty the cells until you paste them somewhere else.

3. Move to the new location in the spreadsheet where you want to paste the cells. If you selected one cell, move to the new cell where you want to place the data. If you selected multiple cells, then move to the top-left corner of the area where you want to paste your selection. If you have existing data below or to the right of this cell, Excel overwrites it with the new content you’re pasting. It’s perfectly acceptable to paste over part of the data you’re copying. For example, you could make a selection that consists of columns A, B, and C and paste that selection starting at column B. In this case, the pasted data appears in columns B, C, and D, and Excel overwrites the original content in these columns (although the original content remains in column A). Tip: In some cases, you want to paste without overwriting part of your worksheet. For example, you might want to paste a column in a new position and shift everything else out of the way. To pull this trick off, you need the Insert Copied Cells command, which is described on page 114.

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4. Paste the data by selecting Home➝Clipboard➝Paste (or press Ctrl+V or Enter on the keyboard). If you’re performing a cut-and-paste, Excel removes the original data from the spreadsheet just before pasting it in the new location. If you’re performing a copy-and-paste, a tiny clipboard icon appears in the bottom-right corner of your pasted cells, with the text “(Ctrl)” next to it. Click this icon and you’ll get a menu of specialized paste options (described on page 107).

A Quicker Cut-and-Paste or Copy-and-Paste If you want a really quick way to cut and paste data, you can use Excel’s drag-anddrop feature. It works like this: 1. Select the cells you want to move. Just drag your pointer over the block of cells you want to select. 2. Click the border of the selection box and don’t release the mouse button. You’ll know that you’re in the right place when the mouse pointer changes to a four-way arrow. You can click any edge, but don’t click in the corner. 3. Drag the selection box to its new location. If you want to copy (not move) the text, hold down the Ctrl key while you drag. As you drag, a light-gray box shows you where Excel will paste the cells. 4. Release the mouse button to move the cells. If you drop the cells into a region that overlaps with other data, Excel prompts you to make sure that you want to overwrite the existing cells. This convenience isn’t provided with ordinary cut-and-paste operations. (Excel uses it for dragand-drop operations because it’s all too easy to inadvertently drop your cells in the wrong place, especially while you’re still getting used to this feature.) Tip: Excel has a hidden dragging trick that impresses even the most seasoned users. To use it, follow the steps listed above but click on the border of the selection box with the right mouse button instead of the left. When you release the mouse button to finish the operation, a pop-up menu appears with a slew of options. Using this menu, you can perform a copy instead of a move, shift the existing cells out of the way, or use a special pasting option to copy values, formats, or links (page 107).

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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

The Mysterious Number Signs What does it mean when I see ####### in a cell? A series of number signs is Excel’s way of telling you that a column isn’t wide enough to display the number or date that it contains (see Figure 3-6). Sometimes these signs appear when you’re copying a big number into smaller cell. The problem here is that Excel needs a certain amount of space to show your number. It’s not acceptable to show just the first two digits from the number 412, for example, because that will look like the completely different number 41. However, Excel will trim off decimal places, if it can, which means that it will show 412.22344364 as 412.223 in a narrow column, while storing the full value with all the decimal places behind the scenes. But when the column is too narrow to show the whole number part of your value, or if you’ve set a required number of decimal places for your cell (page 141) and the column is too narrow to accommodate them, Excel shows the number signs to flag the problem. Fortunately, it’s easy to solve this problem—just position the mouse pointer at the right edge of the cell header and drag it to the right to enlarge the column. Provided you’ve made the column large enough, the missing number reappears.

For a quicker solution, double-click the right edge of the column to automatically make it large enough. This error doesn’t usually occur while you’re entering information for the first time because Excel automatically resizes columns to accommodate any numbers you type in. The problem is more likely to crop up if you shrink a column afterward, or if you cut some numeric cells from a wide column and paste them into a much narrower column. To verify the source of your problem, just move to the offending cell and then check the formula bar to see your complete number or date. Excel doesn’t use the number signs with text cells—if those cells aren’t large enough to hold their data, the words simply spill over to the adjacent cell (if it’s blank) or become truncated (if the adjacent cell has some content). There’s one other situation that can cause a cell to display #######. If you create a formula that subtracts one time from another (as described in Chapter 11), and the result is a negative time value, you see the same series of number signs. But, in this case, column resizing doesn’t help.

Figure 3-6: Cell C4 has a wide number in an overly narrow column. You can see the mystery number if you move to the cell and check out the formula bar (it’s 10,042.01), or you can expand the column to a more reasonable width.

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Fancy Pasting Tricks When you copy cells, everything comes along for the ride, including text, numbers, and formatting. For example, if you copy a column that has one cell filled with bold text and several other cells filled with dollar amounts (including the dollar sign), when you paste this column into its new location, the numbers will still have the dollar sign and the text will still have bold formatting. If you want to change this behavior, you can use one of Excel’s fancy paste options. In the past, these options could be intimidatingly complex. But Excel 2010 improves life with a new paste preview feature. This allows you to preview what your pasted cells will look like before you’ve actually pasted them into your worksheet. Here’s how to try it out. First, copy your cells in the normal way. (Don’t cut them, or the Paste Special feature won’t work.) Then, move to where you want to paste the information, go to the Home➝Clipboard section of the ribbon, and click the dropdown arrow at the bottom of the Paste button. You’ll see a menu full of tiny pictures, each of which represents a different type of paste (see Figure 3-7). Here’s where things get interesting. When you hover over one of these pictures (but don’t click it), the name of the paste option pops up, and Excel shows you a preview of what the pasted data will look in your worksheet. If you’re happy with the result, click the picture to finish the paste. Or move your mouse over a different option to preview its results. And if you get cold feet, you can call the whole thing off by clicking any cell on the worksheet, in which case the preview will disappear and the worksheet will return to its previous state. Figure 3-7: In this example, the original data is in cells C1 to C6. The paste preview is shown in cells E1 to E6. Here, the preview is for the Values paste option, which copies all the numbers but none of the formatting. You can move to a different paste option and get a different preview or click a cell in the worksheet to banish the preview and cancel the paste operation.

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When you copy Excel cells (as opposed to data from another program), the list of paste options includes fourteen choices arranged into three groups. In the first group, named Paste, you’ll find these choices: • Paste. This option is the same as a normal paste operation, and it pastes both formatting and numbers. • Formulas. This option pastes only cell content—numbers, dates, and text— without any formatting. If your source range includes any formulas, Excel also copies the formulas. • Formulas and Number Formatting. This option is the same as Formulas, except it also copies the settings that control how numbers appear. (In other words, numbers that have currency signs, percentage signs, or thousands separators will remain formatted. However, you’ll lose other formatting details, like fancy fonts, colors, and borders.) • Keep Source Formatting. This option copies all the data and the formatting. In fact, it’s the same as the ordinary Paste option, which is an unexplained Excel quirk. • No Borders. This option copies all the data and formatting (just like an ordinary paste), except it ignores any borders that you’ve drawn around the cells. Page 167 describes to add borders between your cells. • Keep Source Column Widths. This option copies all the data and formatting (just like an ordinary paste), but it also adjusts the columns in the paste region so that it has the same widths as the source columns. • Transpose. This option inverts your information before it pastes it, so that all the columns become rows and the rows become columns. Figure 3-8 shows an example. Figure 3-8: With the Transpose option (from the Paste Special dialog box), Excel pastes the table at the top and transposes it on the bottom.

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The second group of paste options, called Paste Values, includes three choices: • Values. This option pastes only cell content—numbers, dates, and text—without any formatting. If your source range includes any formulas, Excel pastes the result of those formulas (the calculated number) but not the actual formulas. (You’ll learn everything you need to know about formulas in Chapter 8.) • Values and Number Formatting. This option pastes the cell content and the formatting settings that control how numbers appear. If your source range includes any formulas, Excel pastes the calculated result of those formulas but not the actual formulas. • Values and Source Formatting. This option is the same as a normal paste operation, except it doesn’t copy formulas. Instead, it pastes the calculated result of any formulas. The third group of paste options, called Other Paste Options, includes four choices that are little more specialized and a little less common: • Formatting. This option applies the formatting from the source selection, but it doesn’t actually copy any data. • Paste Link. This option pastes a link in each cell that refers to the original data. (By comparison, an ordinary paste creates a duplicate copy of the source content.) If you use this option and then modify a value in one of the source cells, Excel automatically modifies the copy, too. (In fact, if you take a closer look at the copied cells in the formula bar, you’ll find that they don’t contain the actual data. Instead, they contain a formula that points to the source cell. For example, if you paste cell A2 as a link into cell B4, the cell B4 contains the reference =A2. You’ll learn more about cell references and get to the bottom of this strange trick in Chapter 8.) • Picture. This option pastes a picture of your cell, which is more than a little odd. The picture is placed right in the worksheet, with the formatting and borders you’d expect. In fact, if you don’t look closely, this picture looks almost exactly like ordinary Excel data. The only way you’ll know that it isn’t is to click it. Unlike ordinary Excel data, you can’t edit the data in a picture; instead, you’re limited to resizing it, dragging it around your worksheet, and changing its borders. (You’ll pick up these picture manipulation skills in Chapter 19.) Note: Although it might make sense to copy a picture of your worksheet into other programs (a feat you’ll master in Chapter 27), there’s little reason to use the picture-pasting feature inside an Excel spreadsheet.

• Linked Picture. This option is the same as Picture, except Excel regenerates the picture whenever you modify the values of formatting in the source cells. This way, the picture always matches the source cells. Excel experts sometimes use

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this feature to create a summary that shows the important parts of a massive spreadsheet in one place. But in the wrong hands, this feature is a head-scratching trick that confuses everyone. At the very bottom of the menu with paste options is a command named Paste Special. This brings up another window, with more esoteric pasting options. You’ll take a peek in the next section. Once you become familiar with the different paste options, you don’t need to rely on the ribbon to use them. Instead, you can use them after a normal copy-and-paste. After you insert your data (by pressing Enter or using the Ctrl+V shortcut), look for the small paste icon that appears near the bottom-right corner of the pasted region. (Excel nerds know this icon as a smart tag.) If you click this icon (or press the Ctrl key), Excel pops open a menu (Figure 3-9) with the same set of paste options you saw earlier. Figure 3-9: The paste icon appears following the completion of every paste operation, letting you control a number of options, including whether the formatting matches the source or destination cells. You can change the type of paste several times, until you get exactly the result you want. The only disadvantage is that this menu doesn’t have the same preview feature that the ribbon offers.

Note: The paste icon appears only after a copy-and-paste operation, not a cut-and-paste operation. If you paste cells from the Clipboard panel, the paste icon still appears, but it provides just two options: keeping the source formatting or pasting the data only.

Paste Special The paste options in the ribbon are practical and powerful. But Excel has even more paste options for those who have the need. To see them all, choose Home➝Clipboard➝Paste➝Paste Special to pop open a dialog box with a slew of options (Figure 3-10).

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Figure 3-10: The Paste Special window allows you to choose exactly what Excel will paste, and it also lets you apply a few other settings. The big drawback is that you don’t get a preview, and some of the options are less than clear. In this example, Excel will perform an ordinary paste with a twist; it won’t bother to copy any blank cells.

Paste Special is a bit of a holdover from the past. Many of its options are duplicated in the ribbon’s drop-down Paste list. However, the Paste Special dialog box allows you to do a few things that aren’t possible from the ribbon, including: • Paste comments. Choose Comments in the Paste section, and click OK. This leaves all the text and formatting behind but copies any comments you’ve added to the cells. (You’ll learn about comments on page 724.) • Paste validation. Choose Validation in the Paste section and click OK. This leaves all the text and formatting behind but copies any validation settings that you’ve applied to the cells. (You’ll learn about validation on page 694.) • Combine source and destination cells. Choose All in the Paste section, choose Add, Subtract, Multiply, or Divide from the Operation section, and then click OK. For example, if you choose Subtract and paste the number 4 into a cell that currently has the number 6, Excel will change the cell to 2 (because 6−2=4). It’s an intriguing idea, but few people use the Operation settings, because they’re not intuitive. • Refrain from copying blank cells. Choose All in the Paste section, click the “Skip blanks” checkbox at the bottom of the dialog box and click OK. Now, if any of the cells you’re copying are blank, Excel ignores them and leaves the current contents of the destination cell intact. (With an ordinary paste, Excel would overwrite the existing value, leaving a blank cell.)

Copying Multiple Items with the Clipboard In Windows’ early days, you could copy only a single piece of information at a time. If you copied two pieces of data, only the most recent item you copied would remain in the clipboard, a necessary way of life in the memory-starved computing days of

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yore. But nowadays, Excel boasts the ability to hold 24 separate cell selections in the Office clipboard. This information remains available as long as you have at least one Office application open. Note: Even though the Office clipboard holds 24 pieces of information, you won’t be able to access all this information in Windows applications that aren’t part of the Office suite. If you want to paste Excel data into a non-Office application, you’ll be able to paste only the data that was added to the clipboard most recently.

When you use the Home➝Clipboard➝Paste command (or Ctrl+V), you’re using the ordinary Windows clipboard. That means you always paste the item most recently added to the clipboard. But if you fire up the Office clipboard, you can hold a lot more. Go to the Home➝Clipboard section of the ribbon and then click the dialog box launcher (the small arrow-in-a-square icon in the bottom-right corner) to open the Clipboard panel. Now Excel adds all the information you copy to both the Windows clipboard and the more capacious Office clipboard. Each item that you copy appears in the Clipboard panel (Figure 3-11). Figure 3-11: The Clipboard panel shows a list of all the items you’ve copied to it since you opened it (up to a limit of 24 items). Each item shows the combined content for all the cells in the selection. For example, the first item in this list includes four cells: the Price column title followed by the three prices. If you’re using multiple Office applications at the same time, you may see scraps of Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or pictures in the clipboard along with your Excel data. The icon next to the item always tells you which program the information came from.

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Using the Clipboard panel, you can perform the following actions: • Click Paste All to paste all the selections into your worksheet. Excel pastes the first selection into the current cell and then begins pasting the next selection starting in the first row underneath that, and so on. As with all paste operations, the pasted cells overwrite any existing content in your worksheet. • Click Clear All to remove all the selections from the clipboard. This is a useful approach if you want to add more data to the Clipboard but don’t want to confuse this information with whatever selection you previously copied. • Click a selection in the list to paste it into the current location in the worksheet. • Click the drop-down arrow at the right of a selection item to show a menu that allows you to paste that item or remove it from the clipboard. Depending on your settings, the Clipboard panel may automatically spring into action. To configure this behavior, click the Options button at the bottom of the Clipboard panel to display a menu of options. These include: • Show Office Clipboard Automatically. If you turn on this option, the Clipboard panel automatically appears if you copy more than one piece of information to the clipboard. (Remember, without the Clipboard panel, you can access only the last piece of information you’ve copied.) • Show Office Clipboard When Ctrl+C Pressed Twice. If you turn on this option, the Clipboard panel appears if you press the Ctrl+C shortcut twice in a row without doing anything else in between. • Collect Without Showing Office Clipboard. If you turn on this option, it overrides the previous two settings, ensuring that the Clipboard panel never appears automatically. You can still call up the Clipboard panel manually, of course. • Show Office Clipboard Icon on Taskbar. If you turn on this option, a clipboard icon appears in the system tray at the right of the taskbar. You can double-click this icon to show the Clipboard panel while working in any Office application. You can also right-click this icon to change clipboard settings or tell the Office clipboard to stop collecting data. • Show Status Near Taskbar When Copying. If you turn on this option, you’ll see a tooltip near the Windows system tray whenever you copy data. (The system tray is the set of notification icons at the bottom-right corner of your screen, in the Windows taskbar.) The icon for the Office clipboard shows a clipboard icon, and it displays a message like “4 of 24 -Item Collected” (which indicates you have just copied a fourth item to the clipboard).

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UP TO SPEED

Cutting or Copying Part of a Cell Excel’s cut-and-paste and copy-and-paste features let you move data in one or more cells. But what if you simply want to take a snippet of text from a cell and transfer it to another cell or even another application? Excel makes this operation possible, but you need to work a little differently. First, move to the cell that contains the content you want to cut or copy and then place it in edit mode by doubleclicking it with the mouse, clicking in the formula bar, or pressing F2. You can now scroll through the cell content using the arrow keys. Move to the position where you want to start chopping or copying, hold down Shift and then arrow over to the right. Keep moving until you’ve selected all

the text you want to cut or copy. Then, hit Ctrl+C to copy the text, or Ctrl+X to cut it. (When you cut text, it disappears immediately, just like in other Windows applications.) Hit Enter to exit edit mode once you’re finished. The final step is to paste your text somewhere else. You can move to another cell that has data in it already, press F2 to enter edit mode again, move to the correct position in that cell, and then press Ctrl+V. However, you can also paste the text directly into a cell by just moving to the cell and pressing Ctrl+V without placing it into edit mode. In this case, the data you paste overwrites the current content in the cell.

Adding and Moving Columns or Rows The cut-and-paste and copy-and-paste operations let you move data from one cell (or group of cells) to another. But what happens if you want to make some major changes to your worksheet itself? For example, imagine you have a spreadsheet with 10 filled columns (A to J) and you decide you want to add a new column between columns C and D. You could cut all the columns from D to J and then paste them starting at E. That would solve the problem and leave the C column free for your new data. But the actual task of selecting these columns can be a little awkward, and it only becomes more difficult as your spreadsheet grows in size. A much easier option is to use two dedicated Excel commands designed for inserting new columns and rows into an existing spreadsheet. If you use these features, you won’t need to disturb your existing cells at all.

Inserting Columns and Rows To insert a new column, follow these steps: 1. Find the column immediately to the right of where you want to place the new column. That means that if you want to insert a new, blank column between columns A and B, start by looking at the existing column B.

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2. Right-click the column header (the gray box with the column letter in it) and choose Insert. Excel inserts a new column and automatically moves all the columns to the right of column A (so column B becomes column C, column C becomes column D, and so on).

Inserting Rows Inserting rows is just as easy as inserting new columns. Just follow these steps: 1. Find the row that’s immediately below where you want to place the new row. That means that if you want to insert a new, blank row between rows 6 and 7, start by looking at the existing row 7. 2. Right-click on the row header (the numbered box at the far left of the row) and choose Insert. Excel inserts a new row, and all the rows beneath it are automatically moved down one row. Note: In the unlikely event that you have data at the extreme right edge of the spreadsheet, in column XFD, Excel doesn’t let you insert a new column anywhere in the spreadsheet because the data would be pushed off into the region Beyond The Spreadsheet’s Edges. Similarly, if you have data in the very last row (row 1,048,576), Excel doesn’t let you insert more rows. If you do have data in either of these spots and try to insert a new column or row, Excel displays a warning message.

Inserting Copied or Cut Cells Usually, inserting entirely new rows and columns is the most straightforward way to change the structure of your spreadsheet. You can then cut and paste new information into the blank rows or columns. However, in some cases, you may simply want to insert cells into an existing row or column. To do so, begin by copying or cutting a cell or group of cells and then select the spot you want to paste into. Next, choose Home➝Cells➝Insert➝Insert Copied Cells from the menu (or Home➝Cells➝Insert➝Insert Cut Cells if you’re performing a cut instead of a copy operation). Unlike the cut-and-paste feature, when you insert cells, you won’t overwrite the existing data. Instead, Excel asks you whether the existing cells should be shifted down or to the right to make way for the new cells (as shown in Figure 3-12). You need to be careful when you use the Insert Copied Cells feature. Because you’re shifting only certain parts of your worksheet, it’s possible to mangle your data, splitting the information that should be in one row or one column into multiple rows or columns! Fortunately, you can always back out of a tight spot using Undo (page 79). Figure 3-13 shows the sort of problem you could encounter.

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Figure 3-12: When you insert copied cells, Excel asks whether it should move the existing cells down or to the right.

Figure 3-13: Top: Here, two price cells ($43.99 and $3.00) were copied and pasted before the picture was taken, and the existing price cells were shifted down to accommodate the new entries. But the prices now no longer line up with the appropriate item names, which is probably not what you want. Bottom: It makes much more sense to use the Insert Copied Cells command when you’re copying a whole row’s worth of data. Here’s worksheet where two new rows have been pasted, and Excel politely moves the original set of items out of the way.

Deleting Columns and Rows In Chapter 1, you learned that you can quickly remove cell values by moving to the cell and hitting the Delete key. You can also delete an entire range of values by selecting multiple cells and hitting the Delete key. Using this technique, you can quickly wipe out an entire row or column. However, using delete simply clears the cell content. It doesn’t remove the cells or change the structure of your worksheet. If you want to simultaneously clear cell values and adjust the rest of your spreadsheet to fill in the gap, you need to use the Home➝Cell➝Delete command. For example, if you select a column by clicking the column header, you can either clear all the cells (by pressing the Delete key) or remove the column (by choosing Home➝Cells➝Delete). Deleting a column in this way is the reverse of inserting a

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column. All the columns to the right are automatically moved one column to the left to fill in the gap left by the column you removed. Thus, if you delete column B, column C becomes the new column B, column D becomes column C, and so on. If you take out row 3, row 4 moves up to fill the void, row 5 becomes row 4, and so on. Usually, you’ll use Home➝Cells➝Delete to remove entire rows or columns. However, you can also use it just to remove specific cells in a column or row. In this case, Excel prompts you with a dialog box asking whether you want to fill in the gap by moving cells in the current column up or by moving cells in the current row to the left. This feature is the reverse of the Insert Copied Cells feature, and you’ll need to take special care to make sure you don’t scramble the structure of your spreadsheet when you use this approach.

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4

Managing Worksheets

S

o far, you’ve learned how to create a basic worksheet with a table of data. That’s great for getting started, but as power users, professional accountants, and other Excel jockeys quickly learn, some of the most compelling reasons to use Excel involve multiple tables that share information and interact with each other.

For example, say you want to track the performance of your company: you create one table summarizing your firm’s yearly sales, another listing expenses, and a third analyzing profitability and making predictions for the coming year. If you create these tables in different spreadsheet files, you must copy shared information from one location to another, all without misplacing a number or making a mistake. And what’s worse, with data scattered in multiple places, you’re missing the chance to use some of Excel’s niftiest charting and analytical tools. But cramming a bunch of tables onto the same worksheet page isn’t the solution. Not only are you likely to lose your spot in the avalanche of data, you’ll also face a host of formatting and cell management problems. Fortunately, a better solution exists. Excel lets you create spreadsheets with multiple pages of data, each of which can conveniently exchange information with other pages. Each page is called a worksheet, and a collection of one or more worksheets is called a workbook (which is also sometimes called a spreadsheet file). In this chapter, you’ll learn how to manage the worksheets in a workbook. You’ll also take a look at Find and Replace, an Excel tool for digging through worksheets in search of specific data.

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Worksheets and Workbooks Many workbooks contain more than one table of information. For example, you might have a list of your bank account balances and a list of items repossessed from your home in the same financial planning spreadsheet. You might find it a bit challenging to arrange these different tables. You could stack them (Figure 4-1) or place them side by side (Figure 4-2), but neither solution is perfect. Figure 4-1: Stacking tables on top of each other is usually a bad idea. If you need to add more data to the first table, then you must move the second table. You’ll also have trouble properly resizing or formatting columns because each column contains data from two different tables.

Figure 4-2: You’re somewhat better off putting tables side by side, separated by a blank column, than you are stacking them, but this method can create problems if you need to add more columns to the first table. It also makes for a lot of side-to-side scrolling.

Most Excel masters agree that the best way to arrange different tables of information is to use separate worksheets for each table. When you create a new workbook, Excel automatically fills it with three blank worksheets named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. Often, you’ll work exclusively with the first worksheet (Sheet1), and not even realize that you have two more blank worksheets to play with—not to mention the ability to add plenty more. To move from one worksheet to another, you have a few choices: • Click the worksheet tabs at the bottom of Excel’s grid window (just above the status bar), as shown in Figure 4-3. • Press Ctrl+Page Down to move to the next worksheet. For example, if you’re currently in Sheet1, this key sequence jumps you to Sheet2.

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• Press Ctrl+Page Up to move to the previous worksheet. For example, if you’re currently in Sheet2, this key sequence takes you back to Sheet1. Figure 4-3: Worksheets provide a good way to organize multiple tables of data. To move from one worksheet to another, click the appropriate Worksheet tab at the bottom of the grid. Each worksheet contains a fresh grid of cells—from A1 all the way to XFD1048576.

Excel keeps track of the active cell in each worksheet. That means if you’re in cell B9 in Sheet1, and then move to Sheet2, when you jump back to Sheet1 you’ll automatically return to cell B9. Tip: Excel includes some interesting viewing features that let you look at two different worksheets at the same time, even if these worksheets are in the same workbook. You’ll learn more about custom views in Chapter 7.

Adding and Removing Worksheets When you start a fresh workbook in Excel, you automatically get three blank worksheets in it. You can easily add more worksheets. Just click the Insert Worksheet button, which appears immediately to the right of your last worksheet tab (Figure 4-4). You can also use the Home➝Cells➝Insert➝Insert Sheet command, which works the same way but inserts a new worksheet immediately to the left of the current worksheet. (Don’t panic: page 122 shows how you can rearrange worksheets after the fact.)

Insert worksheet

Figure 4-4: Every time you click the Insert Worksheet button, Excel inserts a new worksheet after your existing worksheets and assigns it a new name. For example, if you start with the standard Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3 and click the Insert Worksheet button, then Excel adds a new worksheet named—you guessed it—Sheet4.

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If you continue adding worksheets, you’ll eventually find that all the worksheet tabs won’t fit at the bottom of your workbook window. If you run out of space, you need to use the scroll buttons (which are immediately to the left of the worksheet tabs) to scroll through the list of worksheets. Figure 4-5 shows the scroll buttons. Figure 4-5: Using the scroll buttons, you can move between worksheets one at a time or jump straight to the first or last tab. These scroll buttons control only which tabs you see—you still need to click the appropriate tab to move to the worksheet you want to work on. Go to end of the list Scroll forward Scroll backward Go to beginning of the list

Tip: If you have a huge number of worksheets and they don’t all fit in the strip of worksheet tabs, there’s an easier way to jump around. Right-click the scroll buttons to pop up a list with all your worksheets. You can then move to the worksheet you want by clicking it in the list.

Removing a worksheet is just as easy as adding one. Simply move to the worksheet you want to get rid of, and then choose Home➝Cells➝Delete➝Delete Sheet (you can also right-click a worksheet tab, and then choose Delete). Excel won’t complain if you ask it to remove a blank worksheet, but if you try to remove a sheet that contains any data, it presents a warning message asking for your confirmation. Also, if you’re down to one last worksheet, Excel won’t let you remove it. Doing so would create a tough existential dilemma for Excel—a workbook that holds no worksheets—so the program prevents you from taking this step. Warning: Be careful when deleting worksheets, as you can’t use Undo (Ctrl+Z) to reverse this change!

Excel starts you off with three worksheets for each workbook, but changing this setting’s easy. You can configure Excel to start with fewer worksheets (as few as one), or many more (up to 255). Select File➝Options, and then choose the General section. Under the heading “When creating new workbooks”, change the number in the “Include this many sheets” box, and then click OK. This setting takes effect the next time you create a new workbook.

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Note: Although you’re limited to 255 sheets in a new workbook, Excel doesn’t limit how many worksheets you can add after you’ve created a workbook. The only factor that ultimately limits the number of worksheets your workbook can hold is your computer’s memory. However, modern-day PCs can easily handle even the most ridiculously large, worksheet-stuffed workbook.

Hiding Worksheets Deleting worksheets isn’t the only way to tidy up a workbook or get rid of information you don’t want. You can also choose to hide a worksheet temporarily. When you hide a worksheet, its tab disappears, but the worksheet itself remains part of your spreadsheet file, available whenever you choose to unhide it. Hidden worksheets also don’t appear on printouts. To hide a worksheet, right-click the worksheet tab, and then choose Hide. (Or, for a more long-winded approach, choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Hide & Unhide➝Hide Sheet.) To redisplay a hidden worksheet, right-click any worksheet tab, and then choose Unhide. The Unhide dialog box appears along with a list of all hidden sheets, as shown in Figure 4-6. Select a sheet from the list, and then click OK to unhide it. (Once again, the ribbon can get you the same window—just point yourself to Home➝Cells➝Format➝Hide & Unhide➝Unhide Sheet.) Figure 4-6: This workbook contains two hidden worksheets. To restore one, just select it from the list, and then click OK. Unfortunately, if you want to show multiple hidden sheets, you must use the Unhide Sheet command multiple times. Excel has no shortcut for unhiding multiple sheets at once.

Naming and Rearranging Worksheets The standard names Excel assigns to new worksheets—Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3, and so on—aren’t very helpful for identifying what they contain. And they become even less helpful if you start adding new worksheets, since the new sheet numbers don’t necessarily indicate the position of the sheets, just the order in which you created them. For example, if you’re on Sheet 3 and you add a new worksheet (by choosing Home➝ Cells➝Insert➝Insert Sheet), then the worksheet tabs read: Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet4, Sheet3. (That’s because the Insert Sheet command inserts the new sheet just before your current sheet.) Excel doesn’t expect you to stick with these auto-generated

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names. Instead, you can rename them by right-clicking the worksheet tab and selecting Rename, or just double-click the sheet name. Either way, Excel highlights the worksheet tab, and you can type a new name directly onto the tab. Figure 4-7 shows worksheet tabs with better names. Figure 4-7: Worksheet names can be up to 31 characters long and can include letters, numbers, some symbols, and spaces. Remember, though, the longer the worksheet name, the fewer worksheet tabs you’ll be able to see at once, and the more you’ll need to rely on the scroll buttons to the left of the worksheet tabs. For convenience’s sake, try to keep your names brief by using titles like Sales04, Purchases, and Jet_Mileage.

Note: Excel has a small set of reserved names that you can never use. To witness this problem, try to create a worksheet named History. Excel doesn’t let you, because it uses the History worksheet as part of its change tracking features (page 729). Use this Excel oddity to impress your friends.

Sometimes Excel refuses to insert new worksheets exactly where you’d like them. Fortunately, you can easily rearrange any of your worksheets just by dragging their tabs from one place to another, as shown in Figure 4-8. Figure 4-8: When you drag a worksheet tab, a tiny page appears beneath the arrow cursor. As you move the cursor around, you’ll see a black triangle appear, indicating where the worksheet will land when you release the mouse button.

Tip: You can use a similar technique to create copies of a worksheet. Click the worksheet tab and begin dragging, just as you would to move the worksheet. However, before releasing the mouse button, press the Ctrl key (you’ll see a plus sign [+] appear). When you let go, Excel creates a copy of the worksheet in the new location. The original worksheet remains in its original location. Excel gives the new worksheet a name with a number in parentheses. For example, a copy of Sheet1 is named Sheet1 (2). As with any other worksheet tab, you can change this name.

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GEM IN THE ROUGH

Colorful Worksheet Tabs Names aren’t the only thing you can change when it comes to newly added worksheets. Excel also lets you modify a worksheet tab’s background color. This minor convenience has no effect on your data or your printout, but it can help you quickly find an important worksheet if it has lots of neighbors.

To change the background color of a worksheet tab, rightclick the tab, and then select Tab Color (or move to the appropriate worksheet and Home➝Cells➝Format➝Tab Color). A list of color choices appears; make your selection by clicking the color you want.

Moving Worksheets from One Workbook to Another Once you get the hang of creating different worksheets for different types of information, your Excel files can quickly fill up with more sheets than a linens store. What happens when you want to shift some of these worksheets around? For instance, you may want to move (or copy) a worksheet from one Excel file to another. Here’s how: 1. Open both spreadsheet files in Excel. The file that contains the worksheet you want to move or copy is called the source file; the other file (where you want to move or copy the worksheet to) is known as the destination file. 2. Go to the source workbook. Remember, you can move from one window to another using the Windows task bar, or by choosing the file’s name from the ribbon’s View➝Windows➝Switch Windows list. 3. Right-click the worksheet you want to transfer, and then, from the shortcut menu that appears, choose Move or Copy. If you want, you can transfer multiple worksheets at once. Just hold down the Ctrl key, and then select all the worksheets you want to move or copy. Excel highlights all the worksheets you select (and groups them together). Right-click the selection, and then choose Move or Copy. When you choose Move or Copy, the Move or Copy dialog box appears (as shown in Figure 4-9). 4. Choose the destination file from the “To book” list. The “To book” drop-down list shows all the currently open workbooks (including the source workbook).

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Figure 4-9: Here, the selected worksheet is about to be moved into the SimpleExpenses.xlsx workbook. (The source workbook isn’t shown.) The SimpleExpenses workbook already contains three worksheets (named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3). Excel inserts the new worksheet just before the first sheet. Because the “Create a copy” checkbox isn’t turned on, Excel removes the worksheet from the source workbook when it completes the transfer.

Tip: Excel also lets you move your worksheets to a new workbook, which it automatically creates for you. To move them to a new workbook, choose the “(new book)” item in the “To book” list. The new workbook won’t have the standard three worksheets. Instead, it’ll have only the worksheets you’ve transferred.

5. Specify the position where you want the worksheet inserted. Choose a destination worksheet from the “Before sheet” list. Excel places the copied worksheets just before the worksheet you select. If you want to place the worksheets at the end of the destination workbook, select “(move to end).” Of course, you can always rearrange the worksheets after you transfer them, so you don’t need to worry too much about getting the perfect placement. 6. If you want to copy the worksheet, turn on the “Create a copy” checkbox at the bottom of the window. If you don’t turn this option on, then Excel copies the worksheet to the destination workbook and removes it from the source workbook. If you do turn this option on, you’ll end up with a copy of the worksheet in both workbooks. 7. Click OK. This final step closes the Move or Copy dialog box and transfers the worksheet (or worksheets). Note: If there are any worksheet name conflicts, Excel adds a number in parentheses after the moved sheet’s name. For example, if you try to copy a worksheet named Sheet1 to a workbook that already has a Sheet1, Excel names the copied worksheet Sheet1 (2).

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Grouping Worksheets As you’ve seen in previous chapters, Excel lets you work with more than one column, row, or cell at a time. The same holds true for worksheets. You can select multiple worksheets and perform an operation on all of them at once. This process of selecting multiple sheets is called grouping, and it’s helpful if you need to hide or format several worksheets (for example, if you want to make sure all your worksheets start with a bright yellow first row), and you don’t want the hassle of selecting them one at a time. Grouping sheets doesn’t let you do anything you couldn’t do ordinarily—it’s just a nifty timesaver. Here are some operations—all of which are explained in detail below—that you can simultaneously perform on worksheets that are grouped together: • Move, copy, delete, or hide the worksheets. • Apply formatting to individual cells, columns, rows, or even entire worksheets. • Enter new text, change text, or clear cells. • Cut, copy, and paste cells. • Adjust some page layout options, like paper orientation (on the Page Layout tab). • Adjust some view options, like gridlines and the zoom level (on the View tab). To group worksheets, hold down Ctrl while clicking multiple worksheet tabs. When you’re finished making your selections, release the Ctrl key. Figure 4-10 shows an example. Figure 4-10: In this example, Sheet2 and Sheet3 are grouped. When worksheets are grouped, their tab colors change from gray to white. Also, in workbooks with groups, the title bar of the Excel window includes the word [Group] at the end of the file name.

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Tip: As a shortcut, you can select all the worksheets in a workbook by right-clicking any tab, and then choosing Select All Sheets.

To ungroup worksheets, right-click one of the worksheet tabs and select Ungroup Sheets, or just click one of the worksheet tabs that isn’t in your group. You can also remove a single worksheet from a group by clicking it while holding down Ctrl. However, this technique works only if the worksheet you want to remove from the group is not the currently active worksheet. Managing grouped sheets As your workbook grows, you’ll often need better ways to manage the collection of worksheets you’ve accumulated. For example, you might want to temporarily hide a number of worksheets, or move a less important batch of worksheets from the front (that is, the left side) of the worksheet tab holder to the end (the right side). And if a workbook’s got way too many worksheets, you might even want to relocate several worksheets to a brand new workbook. It’s easy to perform an action on a group of worksheets. For example, when you have a group of worksheets selected, you can drag them en masse from one location to another in the worksheet tab holder. To delete or hide a group of sheets, just rightclick one of the worksheet tabs in your group, and then choose Delete or Hide. Excel then deletes or hides all the selected worksheets (provided that action will leave at least one visible worksheet in your workbook). Note: Excel keeps track of print and display settings on a per-worksheet basis. In other words, when you set the zoom percentage to 50 percent in one worksheet so you can see more data, it doesn’t affect the zoom in another worksheet. However, when you make the change for a group of worksheets, they’re all affected in the same way.

Formatting grouped sheets When you format cells inside one grouped worksheet, it triggers the same changes in the cells in the other grouped worksheets. So you have another tool you can use to apply consistent formatting over a batch of worksheets. It’s mainly useful when your worksheets are all structured in the same way. For example, imagine you’ve created a workbook with 10 worksheets, each one representing a different customer order. If you group all 10 worksheets together, and then format just the first one, Excel formats all the worksheets in exactly the same way. Or say you group Sheet1 and Sheet2, and then change the font of column B in Sheet2—Excel automatically changes the font in column B in Sheet1, too. The same is true if you change the formatting of individual cells or the entire worksheet— Excel replicates these changes across the group. (To change the font in the currently

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selected cells, just select the column and, in the Home➝Font section of the ribbon, make a new font choice from the font list. You’ll learn much more about the different types of formatting you can apply to cells in Chapter 5.) Note: It doesn’t matter which worksheet you modify in a group. For example, if Sheet1 and Sheet2 are grouped, you can modify the formatting of both in either worksheet. Excel automatically applies the changes to the other sheet.

Entering data in grouped sheets With grouped worksheets, you can also modify the contents of individual cells, including entering or changing text and clearing cell contents. For example, if you enter a new value in cell B4 in Sheet2, Excel enters the same value into cell B4 in the grouped Sheet1. Even more interesting, if you modify a value in a cell in Sheet2, the same value appears in the same cell in Sheet1, even if Sheet1 didn’t previously have a value in that cell. Similar behavior happens when you delete cells. Editing a group of worksheets at once isn’t as useful as moving and formatting them, but it does have its moments. Once again, it makes most sense when all the worksheets have the same structure. For example, you could use this technique to put the same copyright message in cell A1 on every worksheet, or to add the same column titles to multiple tables (assuming they’re arranged in exactly the same way). One example where grouped sheets make sense is if you have a different worksheet for every month of a year, but each one has the same overall structure. Warning: Be careful to remember the magnified power your keystrokes possess when you’re operating on grouped worksheets. For example, imagine that you move to cell A3 on Sheet1, which happens to be empty. If you click Delete, you see no change. However, if cell A3 contains data on other worksheets that are grouped, these cells are now empty. Grouper beware.

Cut and paste operations work the same way as entering or modifying grouped cells. Whatever action you perform on one grouped sheet, Excel also performs on other grouped sheets. For example, consider what happens if you’ve grouped together Sheet1 and Sheet2, and you copy cell A1 to A2 in Sheet1. The same action takes place in Sheet2—in other words, Excel copies the contents of cell A1 (in Sheet2) to cell A2 (also in Sheet2). Obviously, the contents of cell A1 and A2 in Sheet1 may be different from the contents of cell A1 and A2 in Sheet2—the grouping simply means that whatever was in cell A1 will now also be in cell A2.

Find and Replace When you’re dealing with great mounds of information, you may have a tough time ferreting out the nuggets of data you need. Fortunately, Excel’s find feature is great for helping you locate numbers or text, even when they’re buried within massive

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workbooks holding dozens of worksheets. And if you need to make changes to a bunch of identical items, the find-and-replace option can be a real timesaver. The Find and Replace feature includes both simple and advanced options. In its basic version, you’re only a quick keystroke combo away from a word or number you know is lurking somewhere in your data pile. With the advanced options turned on, you can do things like search for cells that have certain formatting characteristics and apply changes automatically. The next few sections dissect these features.

The Basic Find Excel’s Find feature is a little like the Go To tool described in Chapter 1, which lets you move across a large expanse of cells in a single bound. The difference is that Go To moves to a known location, using the cell address you specify. The Find feature, on the other hand, searches every cell until it finds the content you’ve asked Excel to look for. Excel’s search works similarly to the search feature in Microsoft Word, but it’s worth keeping in mind a few additional details: • Excel searches by comparing the content you enter with the content in each cell. For example, if you searched for the word Date, Excel identifies as a match a cell containing the phrase Date Purchased. • When searching cells that contain numeric or date information, Excel always searches the cell content, not the display text. (For more information about the difference between the way Excel displays a numeric value and the underlying value Excel actually stores, see page 143.) For example, say a cell displays dates using the day-month-year format, like 2-Dec-10. Internally, Excel stores the date as 12/2/2010, which you’ll see if you move to the cell and look in the formula bar. Thus, if you perform a search for 2010 or 12/2 you’ll find the cell, because your search text matches part of the stored content. But if you search for Dec or 2-Dec-10, you won’t find a match. A similar behavior happens with numbers. For example, the search string $3 won’t match the currency value $3.00, because the dollar sign isn’t part of the stored cell value—it’s just a formatting detail. You can change this behavior and start searching the cell display text using the “Look in” setting described on page 132. • Excel searches one cell at a time, from left to right. When it reaches the end of a row, it moves to the first column of the next row. To perform a find operation, follow these steps: 1. Move to the cell where you want the search to begin. If you start halfway down the worksheet, for example, the search covers the cells from there to the end of the worksheet, and then “loops over” and starts at cell A1. If you select a group of cells, Excel restricts the search to just those cells. You can search across a set of columns, rows, or even a noncontiguous group of cells.

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2. Choose Home➝Editing➝Find & Select➝Find, or press Ctrl+F. The Find and Replace window appears, with the Find tab selected. Note: To assist frequent searches, Excel lets you keep the Find and Replace window hanging around (rather than forcing you to use it or close it, as is the case with many other dialog boxes). You can continue to move from cell to cell and edit your worksheet data even while the Find and Replace window remains visible.

3. In the “Find what” combo box, enter the word, phrase, or number you’re looking for. If you’ve performed other searches recently, you can reuse these search terms. Just choose the appropriate search text from the “Find what” drop-down list. 4. Click Find Next. Excel jumps to the next matching cell, which becomes the active cell. However, Excel doesn’t highlight the matched text or in any way indicate why it decided the cell was a match. (That’s a bummer if you’ve got, say, 200 words crammed into a cell.) If it doesn’t find a matching cell, Excel displays a message box telling you it couldn’t find the requested content. If the first match isn’t what you’re looking for, you can keep looking by clicking Find Next again to move to the next match. Keep clicking Find Next to move through the worksheet. When you reach the end, Excel resumes the search at the beginning of your worksheet, potentially bringing you back to a match you’ve already seen. When you’re finished with the search, click Close to get rid of the Find and Replace window.

Find All One of the problems with searching in Excel is that you’re never quite sure how many matches there are in a worksheet. Sure, clicking Find Next gets you from one cell to the next, but wouldn’t it be easier for Excel to let you know right away how many matches it found? Enter the Find All feature. With Find All, Excel searches the entire worksheet in one go, and compiles a list of matches, as shown in Figure 4-11. The Find All button doesn’t lead you through the worksheet like the Find feature. It’s up to you to select one of the results in the list, at which point Excel automatically moves you to the matching cell.

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Figure 4-11: In the example shown here, the search for “Price” matched three cells in the worksheet. The list shows you the complete text in the matching cell and the cell reference (for example, $C$1, which is a reference to cell C1).

The Find All list won’t automatically refresh itself: After you’ve run a Find All search, if you add new data to your worksheet, you need to run a new search to find any newly added terms. However, Excel does keep the text and numbers in your founditems list synchronized with any changes you make in the worksheet. For example, if you change cell D5 to Total Price, the change appears in the Value column in the found-items list automatically. This tool is great for editing a worksheet because you can keep track of multiple changes at a single glance. Finally, the Find All feature is the heart of another great Excel guru trick: it gives you another way to change multiple cells at once. After you’ve performed the Find All search, select all the entries you want to change from the list by clicking them while you hold down Ctrl (this trick lets you select several at once). Click the formula bar, and then start typing the new value. When you’re finished, hit Ctrl+Enter to apply your changes to every selected cell. Voilà—it’s like Find and Replace, but you’re in control!

More Advanced Searches Basic searches are fine if all you need to find is a glaringly unique phrase or number (Pet Snail Names or 10,987,654,321). But Excel’s advanced search feature gives you lots of ways to fine-tune your searches or even search more than one worksheet. To conduct an advanced search, begin by clicking the Options button in the Find and Replace window, as shown in Figure 4-12.

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Figure 4-12: In the standard Find and Replace window (top), when you click Options, Excel gives you a slew of additional settings (bottom) so you can configure things like search direction, case sensitivity, and format matching.

You can set any or all of the following options: • The Within box controls the span of your search. The standard option, Sheet, searches all the cells in the currently active worksheet. If you want to continue the search in the other worksheets in your workbook, choose Workbook. When performing a workbook search, Excel examines your worksheets from left to right, starting with the current worksheet. When it finishes searching the last worksheet in your workbook, it loops back and starts again at the first worksheet in the workbook. • The Search box chooses the direction of the search. The standard option, By Rows, completely searches each row before moving on to the next one. That means that if you start in cell B2, Excel searches C2, D2, E2, and so on. Once it’s moved through every column in the second row, it moves onto the third row and searches from left to right. On the other hand, if you choose By Columns, Excel searches all the rows in the current column before moving to the next column. That means that if you start in cell B2, Excel searches B3, B4, and so on until it reaches the bottom of the column, and then starts at the top of the next column (column C). Note: The search direction determines which path Excel follows when it’s searching. However, the search will still ultimately traverse every cell in your worksheet (or the current selection).

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• The “Look in” box tells Excel what to examine in each cell. If you choose Formulas (the standard option), Excel tries to make a match between your search text and the cell content (for example, the number 3.5 or the date 12/2/2010). If you choose Values, Excel tries to make a match between your search text and the cell display text (for example, the formatted number $3.50 or the formatted date 2-Dec-10). And if you choose Comments, Excel searches the text of any attached comment boxes (page 724), but ignores the actual cell content. • The “Match case” option specifies whether capitalization is important. If you select “Match case”, Excel finds only words or phrases whose capitalization matches. Thus, searching for Date matches the cell value Date, but not date. • The “Match entire cell contents” option lets you restrict your searches to the entire contents of a cell. Excel ordinarily looks to see if your search term is contained anywhere inside a cell. So, if you specify the word Price, Excel finds cells containing text like Current Price and even Repriced Items. Similarly, a number like 32 will match cell values like 3253, 10032, and 1.321. Turning on the “Match entire cell contents” option forces Excel to be precise. Note: Remember, Excel searches for numbers as they’re displayed (as opposed to looking at the underlying values that Excel uses to store numbers internally). That means that if you’re searching for a number formatted using the dollar Currency format ($32.00, for example), and you’ve turned on the “Match entire cell contents” checkbox, you’ll need to enter the number exactly as it appears on the worksheet. Thus, $32.00 would work, but 32 alone won’t help you.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Using Wildcards Sometimes you sorta, kinda know what you’re looking for— for example, a cell with some version of the word “date” in it (as in “date” or “dated” or “dating”). What you really need is a search tool that’s flexible enough to keep its eyes open for results that are similar but not exactly alike. Power searchers will be happy to know that Excel lets you use wildcards in your searches. Wildcards are search symbols that let you search for variations on a word. The asterisk (*) wildcard represents a group of one or more characters. A search for s*nd finds any word that begins with the letter s and ends with the letters nd; for example, it would find words like sand, sound, send, or even the bizarre series of characters sgrthdnd. The question mark (?) wildcard represents any single character. For example, a search for f?nd turns up find or fund, but not friend.

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Wildcards are particularly useful when you’re using the “Match entire cell contents” option. For example, if you turn on the “Match entire cell contents” option and enter the search term date* you’ll find any cell that starts with the word date. In contrast, if you performed the same search without turning the “Match entire cell contents” option on, you’d find any cell containing the word date. If you happen to want to search for special characters like the asterisk or the question mark, you’ll need to use the tilde (~) before the wildcard. For example, the search string ~* searches for cells that contain the asterisk symbol.

Find and Replace

Finding Formatted Cells Excel’s Find and Replace is an equal opportunity search tool: It doesn’t care what the contents of a cell look like. But what if you know, for example, that the data you’re looking for is formatted in bold, or that it’s a number that uses the Currency format? You can use these formatting details to help Excel find the data you want and ignore cells that aren’t relevant. To use formatting details as part of your search criteria, follow these steps: 1. Launch the Find tool. Choose Home➝Editing➝Find & Select➝Find, or press Ctrl+F. Make sure that the Find and Replace window is showing the advanced options (by clicking the Options button). 2. Decide how you want to specify the formatting. You have two options, and they both involve the Format button that appears next to the “Find what” search box. The quickest approach is to copy all the format information from another cell. To do this, click the arrow on the right-side of the Format button to pop open a menu with additional options, and then click Choose Format From Cell. The mouse pointer changes to a plus symbol with an eyedropper next to it. Next, click any cell that has the formatting you want to match. Keep in mind that when you use this approach, you copy all the format settings. A more controlled approach is to specify the exact formatting settings you want to hunt down. To do this, click the Format button. The Find Format dialog box appears (Figure 4-13). It contains the same options as the Format Cells dialog box discussed on page 139. Using the Find Format dialog box, you can specify any combination of settings for number format, alignment, font, fill pattern, and borders. Chapter 5 explains all these settings in detail. You can also search for protected and locked cells, which are described in Chapter 24. When you’re finished, click OK to return to the Find and Replace window. 3. Review your formatting and start your search. Next to the “Find what” search box, a preview appears indicating the formatting of the cells that you’re searching for, as shown in Figure 4-14. If everything checks out, click Find All or Find Next to get started. To remove these formatting restrictions in subsequent searches, click the arrow on the right of the Format button, and then choose Clear Find Format.

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Figure 4-13: In the Find Format dialog box, Excel won’t use any formatting option that’s blank or grayed out as part of its search criteria. For example, here, Excel won’t search based on alignment. Checkboxes are a little trickier. In some versions of Windows, it looks like the checkbox is filled with a solid square. In other versions of Windows, it looks like the checkbox is dimmed and checked at the same time (as with the “Merge cells” setting in this example). Either way, this visual cue indicates that Excel won’t use the setting as part of its search.

Figure 4-14: The Find Format dialog box shows a basic preview of your formatting choices. In this example, the search will find cells containing the word “price” that also use white lettering, a black background, and the Bauhaus font.

Finding and Replacing Values You can use Excel’s search muscles to find not only the information you’re interested in, but also to modify cells quickly and easily. Excel lets you make two types of changes using its Replace tool: • You can automatically change cell content. For example, you can replace the word Colour with Color or the number $400 with $40. • You can automatically change cell formatting. For example, you can search for every cell that contains the word Price or the number $400 and change the fill color. Or, you can search for every cell that uses a specific font, and modify these cells so they use a new font.

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Here’s how to perform a replace operation. Once you’ve mastered the technique, check out the box on page 136, which describes some super handy tricks you can do with this process. 1. Move to the cell where the search should begin. Remember, if you don’t want to search the entire spreadsheet, just select the range of cells you want to search. 2. Choose Home➝Editing➝Find & Select➝Replace, or press Ctrl+H. The Find and Replace window appears, with the Replace tab selected, as shown in Figure 4-15. Figure 4-15: The Replace tab looks pretty similar to the Find tab. Even the advanced options are the same. The only difference is that you also need to specify the text you want to use as a replacement for the search terms you find.

3. In the “Find what” box, enter your search term. In the “Replace with” box, enter the replacement text. Type the replacement text exactly as you want it to appear. If you want to set any advanced options, click the Options button (see the earlier sections “More Advanced Searches” and “Finding Formatted Cells” for more on your choices). 4. Perform the search. You’ve got four different options here. Replace All immediately changes all the matches your search identifies. Replace changes only the first matched item (you can then click Replace again to move on to subsequent matches or to select any of the other three options). Find All works just like the same feature described on page 129. Find Next moves to the next match, where you can click Replace to apply your specified change, or click any of the other three buttons. The replace options are good if you’re confident you want to make a change; the find options work well if you first want to see what changes you’re about to make (although you can reverse either option using Ctrl+Z to fire off the Undo command). Note: It’s possible for a single cell to contain more than one match. In this case, clicking Replace replaces every occurrence of that text in the entire cell.

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POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Mastering the Art of Replacement You can use the Find and Replace feature in many imaginative ways. Here are just a few examples: • You can automatically delete a specific piece of text. Just enter the appropriate “Find what” text, and leave the “Replace with” box blank. • You can change the formatting used in specific cells. Just type the same text in both the “Find what” and “Replace with” text, and then click the Format button next to the “Replace with” combo box to set some formatting attributes. (You don’t need to specify any formatting settings for your “Find what” search criteria.)

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• You can change the formatting used in a series of cells. For example, imagine you have a worksheet that has several cells bolded. Say you want to adjust the formatting of these cells to use a new font. To perform this operation, leave both the “Find what” and “Replace with” boxes blank. Then, set the formatting search criteria to look for the bold font attribute, and set the replacement formatting to use the new font. Click Replace All, and all the cells that currently have bold formatting acquire the new font. You might find mastering this technique tricky, but it’s one of the most powerful formatting tricks around.

chapter

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Formatting Cells

W

hen you create a basic workbook, you’ve taken only the first step toward mastering Excel. If you plan to print your data, email it to colleagues, or show it off to friends, you need to think about whether you’ve formatted your worksheets in a viewer-friendly way. The careful use of color, shading, borders, and fonts can make the difference between a messy glob of data and a worksheet that’s easy to work with and understand. But formatting isn’t just about deciding, say, where and how to make your text bold. Excel also lets you control the formatting of numerical values. In fact, two aspects of formatting are fundamental in any worksheet: • Cell appearance. Cell appearance formatting is all about cosmetic details like color, typeface, alignment, and borders. When most people think of formatting, they think of cell appearance first. • Cell values. Cell value formatting controls the way Excel displays numbers, dates, and times. For numbers, this includes details like whether to use scientific notation, the number of decimal places displayed, and the use of currency symbols, percent signs, and commas. With dates, cell value formatting determines what parts of the date the cell displays, and in what order. In many ways, cell value formatting is more significant than cell appearance formatting, because it can change the meaning of your data. For example, even though 45%, $0.45, and 0.450 are all the same number (just formatted differently), your spreadsheet readers will see a failing test score, a cheap price for chewing gum, and a world-class batting average.

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Note: Keep in mind that regardless of how you format your cell values, Excel maintains an unalterable value for every number entered. For more on how Excel internally stores numbers, see the box on page 143.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about cell value formatting, and then unleash your inner artist with cell appearance formatting.

Formatting Cell Values The basic principle behind cell value formatting is this: the cell value that Excel stores doesn’t necessarily match the cell value it displays. This gives you the best of both worlds. Your cells can store super-accurate values, but you don’t need to clutter your worksheet with numbers that have 13 decimal places. To make your worksheet’s as clear and readable as possible, you need to make sure that the display value is in a form that makes sense for your spreadsheet. Figure 5-1 shows how Excel can show the same number in a variety of ways. Figure 5-1: This worksheet shows how different formatting can affect the appearance of the same data. Each of the cells B2, B3, and B4 contain the same number: 5.18518518518519. In the formula bar, Excel always displays the exact number it’s storing, as you see here with cell B2. However, in the worksheet itself, each cell’s appearance differs depending on how you format the cell.

The first time you type a number or date into a blank cell, Excel makes an educated guess about the number format you want. For example, if you type in a currency value like $34.99, Excel assumes you want a number format that uses the dollar sign. If you then type in a new number in the same cell without a dollar sign (say, 18.75), Excel adds the dollar sign automatically (making it $18.75).

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Changing the Cell Value Format Before long, you’ll need to change a cell value format, or you’ll want to fine-tune it. The basic process unfolds like this: 1. Select the cells you want to format. You can apply formatting to individual cells or a collection of cells. Usually, you’ll want to format an entire column at once because all the values in a column typically contain the same type of data. Remember, to select a column, you simply need to click the column header (the gray box at the top with the column letter) or press Ctrl+Space. Note: Technically, a column contains two types of data: the values you’re storing within the actual cells and the column header in the topmost cell (where the text is). However, you don’t need to worry about unintentionally formatting the column title because Excel applies number formats only to numeric cells (cells that contain dates, times, or numbers). Excel doesn’t use the number format for the column header cell, because it contains text.

2. Select Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells, or just right-click the selection, and then choose Format Cells. In either case, the Format Cells dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 5-2. Figure 5-2: The Format Cells dialog box provides one-stop shopping for cell value and cell appearance formatting. The first tab, Number, lets you configure numeric value formatting. You can use the Alignment, Font, Border, and Fill tabs to control the cell’s appearance. Finally, the Protection tab lets you prevent changes and hide formulas. (You’ll learn about worksheet protection features in Chapter 24.)

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3. Set the format options. The Number tab’s options let you choose how Excel translates the cell value into a display value. For example, you can change the number of decimal places that Excel uses to show the number. (The next section covers number formatting choices in much more detail.) Most of the Format Cells dialog box’s other tabs are for cell appearance formatting, which is covered later in this chapter. Note: Once you apply formatting to a cell, it retains that formatting even if you clear the cell’s contents (by selecting it, and then pressing Delete). In addition, formatting comes along for the ride if you copy a cell, so if you copy the content from cell A1 to cell A2, the formatting comes with it. Formatting includes both cell value formatting and cell appearance. The only way to remove formatting is to highlight the cell and select Home➝Editing➝Clear➝Clear Formats. This command removes the formatting, restoring the cell to its original, General number format (which you’ll learn more about next), but it doesn’t remove any of the cell’s content.

4. Click OK. Excel applies your formatting changes and changes how it displays the values of the selected cells accordingly. You’ll spend a lot of time in this chapter at the Format Cells dialog box. As you’ve already seen, the most obvious way to get there is to choose Home➝Format➝Cells➝Format Cells. However, your mouse finger’s sure to tire out with that method. Fortunately, there’s a quicker route—you can use one of three dialog box launchers. Figure 5-3 shows the way. Figure 5-3: The ribbon’s Home tab gives you a quick way to open the Format Cells dialog box from three different spots: the Font tab, the Alignment tab, or the Number tab.

Tip: If you don’t want to take your fingers off the keyboard, you can use the shortcut Ctrl+1 to show the Format Cells dialog box at any time.

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Formatting Numbers In the Format Cells dialog box, the Number tab lets you control how Excel displays numeric data in a cell. Excel gives you a lengthy list of predefined formats (as shown in Figure 5-4), and also lets you design your own formats. Remember, Excel uses number formats when the cell contains only numeric information. Otherwise, Excel simply ignores the number format. For example, if you enter Half past 12 in a column full of times, Excel considers it plain ol’ text—although, under the hood, the cell’s numerical formatting stays put, and Excel uses it if you change the cell content to a time. When you create a new spreadsheet, every cell starts out with the same number format: General. This format comes with a couple of basic rules: • If a number has any decimal places, Excel displays them, provided they fit in the column. If the number has more decimal places than Excel can display, it leaves out the ones that don’t fit. (It rounds up the last displayed digit, when appropriate.) If you change a column width, Excel automatically adjusts the amount of digits it displays. • Excel removes leading and trailing zeros. Thus, 004.00 becomes 4. The only exception to this rule happens with numbers between –1 and 1, which retain the 0 before the decimal point. For example, Excel displays the number .42 as 0.42. Figure 5-4: You can learn about the different number formats by selecting a cell that already has a number in it, and then choosing a new number format from the Category list (Home➝Cells➝Format➝ Format Cells). When you do so, Excel uses the Format Cells dialog box to show how it’ll display the number if you apply that format. In this example, you see that the cell value, 5.18518518518519, will appear as 5.19E+00, which is scientific notation with two decimal places.

As you saw in Chapter 2, the way you type in a number can change a cell’s formatting. For example, if you enter a number with a currency symbol, the number format of the cell changes automatically to Currency. Similarly, if you enter three numbers separated by dashes (-) or forward slashes (/), Excel assumes you’re entering a date, and adjusts the number format to Date.

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However, rather than rely on this automatic process, it’s far better just to enter ordinary numbers and set the formatting explicitly for the whole column. This approach prevents you from having different formatting in different cells (which can confuse even the sharpest spreadsheet reader), and it makes sure you get exactly the formatting and precision you want. You can apply formatting to the column before or after you enter the numbers. And it doesn’t matter if a cell is currently empty; Excel still keeps track of the number format you’ve applied. Different number formats provide different options. For example, if you choose the Currency format, then you can choose from dozens of currency symbols. When you use the Number format, you can choose to add commas (to separate groups of three digits) or parentheses (to indicate negative numbers). Most number formats let you set the number of decimal places. The following sections give a quick tour of the predefined number formats available in the Format Cells dialog box’s Number tab. Figure 5-5 gives you an overview of how different number formats affect similar numbers. Figure 5-5: Each column contains the same list of numbers. Although this worksheet shows an example for each number format (except dates and times), it doesn’t show all your options. Each number format has its own settings (like the number of decimal places) that affect how Excel displays data.

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places. That means if you want to display numbers that differ wildly in precision (like 0.5, 12.334, and 0.120986398), it makes sense to use General format. On the other hand, if your numbers have a similar degree of precision (for example, if you’re logging the number of miles you run each day), the Number format makes more sense. Number The Number format is like the General format but with three refinements. First, it uses a fixed number of decimal places (which you set). That means that the decimal point always lines up (assuming you’ve formatted an entire column). The Number format also lets you use commas as a separator between groups of three digits, which is handy if you’re working with really long numbers. Finally, you can choose to have negative numbers displayed with the negative sign, in parentheses, or in red lettering. UP TO SPEED

The Relationship Between Formatting and Values The format that you choose for a number doesn’t affect Excel’s internal storage of that number. For example, if a cell contains the fraction 1/3, then Excel stores this value as 0.333333333333333. (The exact number of decimal places varies, depending on the number you’ve entered, due to the slight approximations computers need to make when converting fractional numbers into 0s and 1s.) When deciding how to format a cell, you may choose to show only two decimal places, in which case the number appears in your worksheet as 0.33. Or maybe you choose just one decimal place, in which case the number is simply 0.3. In both cases, Excel still keeps the full 15 or so decimal places on hand. To tell the difference between the displayed number and the real number that Excel stores behind the scenes, just move to the cell. Then look at the formula bar, which always shows you the real deal. Because of this difference between the stored value and the displayed number, there may be some situations where it looks like Excel’s making a mistake. For example, imagine you have three cells, and each stores 0.333333333333333 but displays only 0.3. When you add these three cell values together, you won’t end up with 0.3 + 0.3 + 0.3 = 0.9.

Instead, you’ll add the more precise stored values and end up with a number that’s infinitesimally close to, but not quite, 1. Excel rounds this number up to 1. This is almost always the way you want Excel to work, because you know full well that if you add up 1/3 three times you end up with 1. But, if you need to, you can change this behavior. To change what Excel does, select File➝Options, choose the Advanced section, and then scroll down to the “When calculating this workbook” group of settings. A “Set precision as displayed” checkbox appears. When you turn on this checkbox, Excel adjusts all the values in your current spreadsheet so that the stored value matches the displayed value. Unfortunately, with this choice, you get less precise data. For example, if you use this option with the 1/3 example, Excel stores the display value 0.3 instead of 0.333333333333333. Because you can’t reverse this change, Excel warns you and asks for a final confirmation when you try to apply the “Precision as displayed” setting.

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Currency The Currency format closely matches the Number format, with two differences. First, you can choose a currency symbol (like the dollar sign, pound symbol, euro symbol, and so on) from an extensive list; Excel displays the currency symbol before the number. Second, the Currency format always includes commas. The Currency format also supports a fixed number of decimal places (chosen by you), and it lets you customize how negative numbers are displayed. Accounting The Accounting format is modeled on the Currency format. It also lets you choose a currency symbol, uses commas, and has a fixed number of decimal places. The difference is that the Accounting format uses a slightly different alignment. The currency symbol’s always at the far left of the cell (away from the number), and there’s always an extra space that pads the right side of the cell. Also, the Accounting format always shows negative numbers in parentheses, which is an accounting standard. Finally, the Accountancy format never shows the number 0. Instead, a dash (–) is displayed in its place. There’s really no reason to prefer the Currency or the Accounting format. Think of it as a personal decision, and choose whichever looks nicest on your worksheet. The only exception is if you happen to be an accountant, in which case you really have no choice in the matter—stick with your namesake. Percentage The Percentage format displays fractional numbers as percentages. For example, if you enter 0.5, that translates to 50 percent. You can choose the number of decimal places to display. There’s one trick to watch out for with the Percentage format. If you forget to start your number with a decimal, Excel quietly “corrects” your numbers. For example, if you type 4 into a cell that uses the Percentage format, Excel interprets this as 4 percent. As a result, it actually stores the value 0.04. A side-effect of this quirkiness is that if you want to enter percentages larger than 100 percent, you can’t enter them as decimals. For example, to enter 200 percent, you need to type in 200 (not 2.00). Fraction The Fraction format displays your number as a fraction instead of a number with decimal places. The Fraction format doesn’t mean you must enter the number as a fraction (although you can if you want by using the forward slash, like 3/4). Instead it means that Excel converts any number you enter and displays it as a fraction. Thus, to have 1/4 appear you can either enter .25 or 1/4. Note: If you try to enter 1/4 and you haven’t formatted the cell to use the Fraction number format, you won’t get the result you want. Excel assumes you’re trying to enter a date (in this case, January 4 of the current year). To avoid this misunderstanding, change the number format before you type in your fraction. Or, enter it as 0 1/4 (zero and one quarter).

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People often use the Fraction format for stock market quotes, but it’s also handy for certain types of measurements (like weights and temperatures). When using the Fraction format, Excel does its best to calculate the closest fraction, which depends on a few factors including whether an exact match exists (entering .5 always gets you 1/2, for example) and what type of precision level you’ve picked when selecting the Fraction formatting. You can choose to have fractions with three digits (for example, 100/200), two digits (10/20), or just one digit (1/2), using the top three choices in the Type list. For example, if you enter the number 0.51, then Excel shows it as 1/2 in one-digit mode, and the more precise 51/100 in three-digit mode. In some cases, you may want all numbers to use the same denominator (the bottom number in the fraction) so that it’s easy to compare different numbers. (Don’t you wish Excel had been around when you were in grammar school?) In this case, you can choose to show all fractions as halves (with a denominator of 2), quarters (a denominator of 4), eighths (8), sixteenths (16), tenths (10), and hundredths (100). For example, the number 0.51 displays as 2/4 if you choose quarters. Tip: Entering a fraction in Excel can be awkward, because Excel may attempt to convert it to a date. To prevent this confusion, always start by entering 0, and then a space. For example, instead of typing 2/3, enter 0 2/3 (which means zero and two-thirds). If you have a whole number and a fraction, like 1 2/3, you’ll also be able to duck the date confusion.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Just How Precise Are Excel Numbers, Anyway? Can I enter a number with 10 decimal places? How about 20?

of this phenomenon on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point.

Here’s a handy way to find out: type the fraction 2/3 into a cell, and then check the formula bar, which shows you the number Excel has stored. Turns out Excel thinks of 2/3 as 0.666666666666667.

Because Excel doesn’t store fractions precisely as they exist in the world of real math, you may occasionally experience minor rounding errors in calculations with more than 14 significant digits. (Recall from high-school math that the number of significant digits is the number of digits starting with the first nonzero digit and ending with the last nonzero digit. Essentially, the significant digits hold all the information in your number.) This behavior shouldn’t cause you to panic—it’s a limitation of nearly all computer software, based on the way that computers manipulate numbers.

This test shows that Excel is limited to about 15 significant digits, and it rounds up the last digit. You may be slightly unnerved by the word “about,” but in the binary world of computers, fractional numbers don’t have a fixed number of digits and may just be approximations with very slight rounding errors. You can find a good (but technical) explanation

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Scientific The Scientific format displays numbers using scientific notation, which is ideal when you need to handle numbers that range widely in size (like 0.0003 and 300) in the same column. Scientific notation displays the first non-zero digit of a number, followed by a fixed number of digits, and then indicates what power of 10 that number needs to be multiplied by to generate the original number. For example, 0.0003 becomes 3.00×10−4 (displayed in Excel as 3.00E-04). The number 300, on the other hand, becomes 3.00×102 (displayed in Excel as 3.00E02). Scientists—surprise, surprise—like the Scientific format for doing things like recording experimental data or creating mathematical models to predict when an incoming meteor will strike the Earth. Text Few people use the Text format for numbers, but it’s certainly possible to do so. The Text format simply displays a number as though it were text, although you can still perform calculations with it. Excel shows the number exactly as it’s stored internally, positioning it against the left edge of the column. You can get the same effect by placing an apostrophe before the number (although that approach won’t let you use the number in calculations). TIMESAVING TIP

Shortcuts in the Ribbon You don’t need to waste hours jumping between your worksheet and the Format Cells dialog box. The ribbon gets you to some of the most commonly used number formats in the Home➝Number section. The Home➝Number section’s most prominent part is the drop-down list of number formats (Figure 5-6). Just underneath are buttons that let you apply one of the three most common formats: Accounting, Percent, or Number. Just to the right are two buttons that let you increase or decrease the number of decimal places that you see at once.

One of the neatest features is the list of currency options for the Accounting button. If you click the drop-down arrow on the Accounting button (which looks like a dollar sign), you see a list with different currency symbols you can choose (like Pounds, Euros, Chinese Yuan, and so on). But if you click the other portion of the Accounting button (not the arrow), you get the currency symbol that’s appropriate, based on your computer’s regional settings.

Formatting Dates and Times Excel gives you lots of options here. You can use everything from compact styles like 3/13/10 to longer formats that include the day of the week, like Saturday, March 13, 2010. Time formats give you a similar range of options, including the ability to use a 12-hour or 24-hour clock, show seconds, show fractional seconds, and include the date information.

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Figure 5-6: The all-around quickest way to apply a number format is to select some cells, and then, from the number format list, choose an option. Best of all, you see a small preview of what the value in the first selected cell will look like if you apply the format.

To format dates and times, first open the Format Cells dialog box shown in Figure 5-7 (Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells). Choose Date or Time from the column on the left, and then choose the format from the list on the right. Date and Time both provide a slew of options. Excel has essentially two types of date and time formats: • Formats that take the regional settings of the spreadsheet viewer’s computer into account. With these formats, dates display differently depending on the computer that’s running Excel. This choice is a good one, because it lets everyone see dates in just the way they want to, which means no time-consuming arguments about month-day-year or day-month-year ordering. • Formats that ignore the regional settings of individual computers. These formats define a fixed pattern for month, day, year, and time components, and display date-related information in exactly the same way on all computers. If you need to absolutely make sure a date is in a certain format, you should use this choice.

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Figure 5-7: Excel gives you dozens of different ways to format dates and times. You can choose between formats that modify the date’s appearance depending on the regional settings of the computer viewing the Excel file, or you can choose a fixed date format. When using a fixed date format, you don’t need to stick to the U.S. standard. Instead, choose the appropriate region from the Locale list box. Each locale provides its own set of customized date formats.

The first group (the formats that rely on a computer’s regional settings) is the smallest. It includes two date formats (a compact, number-only format and a long, more descriptive format) and one time format. In the Type list, these formats are at the top and have an asterisk next to them. The second group (the formats that are independent of a computer’s regional settings) is much more extensive. In order to choose one of these formats, you first select a region from the Locale list, and then you select the appropriate date or time format (that isn’t preceded by an asterisk). Some examples of locales include “English (U.S.)” and “English (U.K.).” If you enter a date without specifically formatting the cell, Excel usually uses the short region-specific date format. That means that the order of the month and year vary depending on the regional settings of the current computer. If you incorporate the month name (for example, January 1, 2010), instead of the month number (for example, 1/1/2010), Excel uses a medium date format that includes a month abbreviation, like 1-Jan-2010. Note: You may remember from Chapter 2 that Excel stores a date internally as the cumulative number of days that have elapsed since a certain long-ago date. You can take a peek at this internal number using the Format Cells dialog box. First, enter your date. Then, format the cell using one of the number formats (like General or Number). The underlying date number appears in your worksheet where the date used to be.

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Special Formats for Special Numbers You wouldn’t ever want to perform mathematical operations with some types of numeric information. For example, it’s hard to image a situation where you’d want to add or multiply phone numbers or Social Security numbers. When entering these types of numbers, therefore, you may choose to format them as plain old text. For example, you could enter the text (555) 123-4567 to represent a phone number. Because of the parentheses and the dash (–), Excel won’t interpret this information as a number. Alternatively, you could just precede your value with an apostrophe (') to explicitly tell Excel that it should be treated as text (you might do this if you don’t use parentheses or dashes in a phone number). But whichever solution you choose, you’re potentially creating more work for yourself, because you must enter the parentheses and the dash for each phone number you enter (or the apostrophe). You also increase the likelihood of creating inconsistently formatted numbers, especially if you’re entering a long list of them. For example, some phone numbers may end up entered in slightly similar but somewhat different formats, like 555-123-4567 and (555)1234567. To avoid these problems, apply Excel’s Special number format (shown in Figure 5-8), which converts numbers into common patterns. And lucky you: In the Special number format, one of the Type options is Phone Number (other formats are for Zip codes and Social Security numbers). Figure 5-8: Special number formats are ideal for formatting sequences of digits into a common pattern. For example, in the Type list, if you choose Phone Number, then Excel converts the sequence of digits 5551234567 into the proper phone number style—(555) 1234567—with no extra work required on your part.

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The Special format is a good idea, but it’s limited. Out of the box, Excel provides only a small set of special types that you can use. However, there’s no reason you can’t handle similar problems by creating your own custom formats, as you’ll see in the next section.

Custom Formats As versatile as Excel is, it can’t read your mind. You’ll find some situations when you want to format numbers in a specialized way that Excel just doesn’t expect. For example, you may want to use the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format for dates, which is used in a wide range of scientific and engineering documents. This format is year-month-day (as in 2010-12-25). Although it’s fairly straightforward, Excel doesn’t provide this format as a standard option. Or maybe you want to type in short versions of longer numbers. For example, say your company, International Pet Adventures, uses an employee number to identify each worker, in the format 0521-1033. It may be that 0521- is a departmental identification code for the Travel department. To save effort, you want to be able to enter 1033 and have Excel automatically insert the leading 0521- in your worksheets. The solution lies in creating your own custom formats. Custom formats are a powerful tool for taking control of how Excel formats your numbers. Unfortunately, they aren’t exactly easy to master. The basic concept behind custom formats is that you define the format using a string of special characters and placeholders. This format string tells Excel how to format the number or date, including details like how many decimal places it should include, and how it should treat negative numbers. You can also add fixed characters that never change, like the employee number format just described. Creating a custom format Here’s the easiest way to apply a custom format: 1. Select the cells you want to format. This selection can include any combination of cells, columns, rows, and so on. To make life easier, make sure the first cell you select contains a value you want to format. That way, you’ll be able to use the Format Cells dialog box to preview the effect of your custom format. Note: Excel saves any custom format strings you create as part of your workbook file. Once you’ve perfected a format string you like, you can apply it to as many cells as you want.

2. Select Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells, or just right-click the selection, and then choose Format Cells. The Format Cells dialog box appears, as shown earlier in Figure 5-2. 150

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3. Choose a format that’s similar to the format you want to use. For example, if you want to apply a custom date format, begin by selecting the Date number format, and then choosing the appropriate style. If you want to apply a custom currency format, begin by selecting the Currency number format, and then specifying the appropriate options (like the number of decimal places). To create the International Pet Adventures employee code, it makes sense to first select the Number format, and then choose 0 decimal places (because the number format you’re looking to model—0521-1033—doesn’t use any decimal places). 4. At the bottom of the Category list, click Custom. Now you see a list of different custom number strings. At the top of this list is a highlighted format string that’s based on the format you chose in step 3. Now, you just need to modify this string to customize the format. (Make sure you don’t accidentally select another format before you click Custom, or you won’t end up with the right format string.) If you’re creating the International Pet Adventures employee code, you’ll see a 0. This 0 means you can use any number without a decimal place. However, what you really want in this situation is to create an employee number that always starts with 0521- and then has four more digits. You’ll specify your new format in the next step. 5. Enter your custom string. Type your custom string into the box below the Type label, as shown in Figure 5-9. The correct format string for the International Pet Adventures example is as follows: ″0521-″0000

This string tells Excel to begin all cells that are formatted using this Custom format with the digits 0521-, and then follow them with whatever four numbers are entered into the cell (if no numbers are entered, four zeros follow the 0521-). The following sections explain all the ingredients you can use in your custom format. Tip: Remember, you can preview your custom format string in the Format Cells dialog box’s Sample section. As you adjust the custom format string, the Sample box shows you what the current cell would look like if you applied the custom format to it.

6. Click OK to commit your changes. If the results aren’t quite what you want, you can start over again. But this time, skip step 3 because you want to change the current format string rather than replace it with a new format string.

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Figure 5-9: Custom number strings let you do almost anything with a number format, but you need to spell it out explicitly using the cryptic code Excel provides. In the example shown here, the custom format string is “0521”0000. The “0521-” is a fixed string of characters that’s added to the beginning of every number. The four zeros indicate that the cell’s expecting four digits. If you provide a one-, two-, or three-digit number, Excel adds the zeroes needed to make a four-digit number. For example, Excel automatically displays the number 4 as the employee code 0521-0004.

7. To use the Custom format you’ve created, select one or more cells, show the Format Cells dialog box (by right-clicking the cells, and then choosing Format Cells), and then select your new Custom format. Excel lists newly created Custom formats in the Custom category, at the bottom of the Type list. If you wanted to use the new International Pet Adventures employee code, click OK after selecting your new format, and then begin entering the four digits specific to each employee. For example, if you format a cell with the new Custom format, and then type 6754 into the cell, you’ll see 0521-6754. Remember, despite your craft formatting, the actual number is still 6754, which is important to know if you use the number in a calculation. Custom format string codes The tricky part about Custom formats is creating the right format string. To the untrained eye, the format string looks like a cryptic jumble of symbols—which it is. But these symbols, or formatting codes in Excel lingo, actually have very specific and clear meanings.

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For example, the format string $#,##0.00 translates into the following series of instructions: $ tells Excel to add a currency symbol before the number. #,## tells Excel to use commas to separate thousands. 0.00 tells Excel to always include a single digit and two decimal places, no matter what the number is. In fact, $#,##0.00 is the format string for the basic Currency format. Once you understand what the codes stand for and how they work together, you can create some really useful Custom format strings. You have three types of codes at your disposal for creating format strings: those used to format dates and times; those used to format numbers; and those used to format ordinary text. The following three sections tackle each type of format code. Date and time format strings Date and time format strings are built out of pieces. Each piece represents a single part of the date, like the day, month, year, minute, hour, and so on. You can combine these pieces in whatever order you want, and you can insert your own custom text along with these values. Note: Keep in mind that none of these formatting codes actually generate or insert the date in your worksheet for you. That is, simply formatting an empty cell with one of these custom strings isn’t going to cause the date to appear. Instead, these format strings take the dates that you enter and make sure that they all appear in a uniform style.

Table 5-1 shows the basic ingredients for a date or time format string. These strings are placeholders that represent the different parts of the date. If you want to include fixed text along with the date, put it in quotation marks. Table 5-1. Date and time formatting codes

Example value displayed on worksheet

Code

Description

d

The day of the month, from 1 to 31, with the numbers between 1 and 9 appearing without a leading 0.

7

dd

The day of the month, from 01 to 31 (leading 0 included from 1 to 9).

07

ddd

A three-letter abbreviation for the day of the week.

Thu

dddd

The full name of the day of the week.

Thursday

m

The number value, from 1 to 12, of the month (no leading 0 used).

1

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mm

The number value, from 01 to 12, of the month (leading 0 used for 01 to 09).

01

mmm

A three-letter abbreviation for the month.

Jan

mmmm

The full name of the month.

January

yy

A two-digit abbreviation of the year.

10

yyyy

The year with all four digits.

2010

h

The hour, from 0 to 23 (no leading 0 used).

13

hh

The hour, from 00 to 23 (leading 0 used from 00 to 09).

13

:m

The minute, from 0 to 59.

5

:mm

The minute, from 0 to 59 (leading 0 used for 00 to 09).

05

:s

The second, from 0 to 59 (no leading 0 used). If you want to add tenths, hundredths, or thousandths of a second, follow this with .0 or .00 or .000, respectively. For example, :s.0

5

:ss

The second, from 0 to 59 (leading 0 used from 00 to 09). If you want to add tenths or hundredths of a second, follow this with .0 or .00, respectively.

05

AM/PM

Tells Excel to use a 12-hour clock, including the AM or PM tag.

PM

A/P

Tells Excel to use a 12-hour clock, with an A or P tag.

P

[]

Tells Excel that a given time component (hour, minute, or second) shouldn’t “roll over.” For example, Excel’s standard approach is to have seconds become minutes once they hit the 60 mark, and minutes become hours at the 60 mark. Similarly, hours roll over into a new day when they hit 24. But if you don’t want this to happen—for example, when tracking total time on a CD playlist—you could use a format string like [mm]:ss or [h]:mm:ss. The first format string shows the total time in minutes and seconds (without rolling over to hours), while the second shows the total time in hours, minutes, and seconds (without rolling over to days).

133:12 (for the format string [mm]:ss and a value just over two hours)

For example, consider the following format string: yyyy-mm-dd

If you apply this format string to a cell that contains a date, you’ll end up with the following in your worksheet (assuming you entered the date January 15, 2010): 201001-15.

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Note: Regardless of how you type in the date, once you’ve formatted a cell using a Custom format string, that always overrides the format you use when you type in the date. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you type 1/15/10 or January 15, 2010 in the cell—Excel still displays it as 2010-01-15, if that’s what your custom format dictates.

Now if you format the same value with this format string: ″Day ″yyyy-mm-dd

You’ll see this in your worksheet: Day 2010-01-15

And remember, whatever information you choose to display or hide, Excel always stores the same date internally. Note: You’ll learn much more about date and time calculations in Chapter 11.

Number format strings Custom number formats are more challenging than Custom date formats, because Excel gives you lots of flexibility when it comes to customizing number formats. Table 5-2 shows the different codes you can use. The most important of these codes are the digit placeholders 0, ?, and #. You use these to tell Excel where it should slot in the various digits of the number that’s currently in the cell (or that you’re typing in). For example, a format string that looks like this: #,###.00

displays the numbers 45 and 4,500 like this: 45.00 4,500.00

In this format string, the # character is a placeholder that lets you put the comma wherever you want it. The 0 character is a placeholder that makes sure the trailing zeroes appear, even when you’re showing a whole number. Table 5-2 reveals many more tricks of the trade. Table 5-2. Number formatting codes

Code

Description

Example

0

This digit placeholder forces a zero to appear whenever a number isn’t provided.

0.000 displays .3 as 0.300.

?

This digit placeholder forces a space to appear whenever a number isn’t provided.

?.??? displays .3 as “ .3 ” (quotations used to indicate spacing).

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#

This digit placeholder indicates where you can place a number, but doesn’t automatically insert a zero or a space if there isn’t a number in this position. You can use this symbol to set the precision of decimal values or to indicate where commas should go.

### displays .3 as .3. #,### displays 9999 as 9,999.

.

The period, or decimal point, determines where the decimal place will go. It’s used in conjunction with the digit placeholders 0, ?, and #.

#.## truncates 1.23456 to 1.23.

,

The comma causes the thousands separator to appear. It’s used with the digit placeholders 0, ?, and #. You can also use it to scale a number. For example, if you place one comma at the end of a format string, then Excel displays the number rounded to thousands. Add two commas to the end, and Excel displays the number only in millions (and so on).

#,### displays 3000 as 3,000. #,###,###, displays 123456789 as 123,457 (rounded to thousands).

/

The forward slash formats a number as a fraction. You use this symbol in conjunction with the digit placeholders ? and # to indicate the number of digits you want in your fraction.

?/? displays 1.75 as 7/4, while # ?/? formats the same number as 1 3/4.

E+

This code formats numbers using scientific notation. You use this symbol in conjunction with the digit placeholders 0, ?, and #.

#.## E+## means Excel displays 12345 as 1.23 E+4.

[color]

Applies a specified color to the text that follows the closing bracket. The color name goes inside the square brackets. Excel supports eight colors: [black], [blue], [cyan], [green], [magenta], [red], [white], and [yellow].

[red]#,### displays the number that follows the brackets in red lettering.

_

The underscore character, when followed by any other character, inserts a space equal to the width of that other character. This code is occasionally used when aligning complex formatting codes.

_W inserts a space as wide as the capital letter W.

*

The asterisk, when followed by any other character, inserts that other character in a cell until the cell is filled.

#,###*- displays 9999 as 9,999------ (with the dashes appearing until the cell is filled).

Note: Excel uses custom number formats to decide how to round off displayed numbers, and how to format them (by adding commas, currency symbols, and so on). But no matter what format string you use, you can’t coax Excel into shaving off digits that appear to the left of the decimal place—and for good reason: doing so would mangle your numbers beyond recognition.

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It helps to keep a few pointers in mind when you use the number formatting codes listed in Table 5-2: • Use 0 to indicate a number that must be wherever the 0 is placed—if it’s not, Excel automatically inserts a 0. For example, the format string 0.00 would display the number .3 as 0.30. And the format string 00.00 would format the same value as 00.30. • The question mark (?) works similarly, but it turns into spaces instead of zeros, ensuring that multiple numbers wind up aligned in a column. For example, ??.?? displays the number 3 as “ 3. ” (without the quote marks). • The # symbol lets you indicate where a number can exist but doesn’t have to exist. For example, the format string 0.0# indicates that the first digit before the decimal place and the first digit after the decimal place must be present (that’s what the zeros tell Excel). However, the second number after the decimal place is optional. With this format string, Excel rounds additional digits starting with the third decimal place. Thus, this format string displays the value .3 as 0.3, .34 as 0.34, and .356 as 0.36. You can also use the # symbol to indicate where commas should go, as in the format string #,###.00. This string displays the value 3639 as 3,639.00. Note: Remember, Custom format strings control how Excel displays values. These strings aren’t meant to control what values someone can enter in a cell. To set rules for allowed data, you need a different feature—data validation, described on page 694.

Excel also lets you use codes that apply currency symbols, percent symbols, and colors. As with date values, you can insert fixed text—also known as literals—into a number formatting string using quotation marks. For example, you could add “USD” at the end of the format string to indicate that a number’s denominated in U.S. dollars. Excel automatically recognizes some characters as literals, including currency symbols, parentheses, plus (+) and minus (−) symbols, backward slashes (\), and spaces, which means you don’t need to use quotation marks to have those characters appear. Finally, the last thing you should know about Custom number format strings is that if you’d like your worksheet to display different types of values (for example, negative versus positive) differently, you can actually create a collection of four different format strings, each of which formats different types of numbers, depending on what values you type into the cell. Collectively, these four format strings tell Excel how to deal with positive values, negatives values, zero, and text values. The format strings must always appear in this order and be separated by semicolons. Here’s an example: #,###; [red]#,###; ″---″; @

Excel uses the first format string (#,###) if the cell contains a positive number. Excel uses the second format string ([red]#,###) to display negative numbers. This format

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is the same as for positive numbers, except it displays the text in red. The third format string (“---”) applies to zero values. It inserts three dashes into the cell when the cell contains the number 0. (If the cell is empty, no format string is used, and the cell remains blank.) Finally, Excel uses the last format if you enter text into the cell. The @ symbol simply copies any text into the cell as it’s entered. Tip: For a real trick, use the empty format string ;;; to puzzle friends and coworkers. This format string specifies that no matter what the content in the cell (positive number, negative number, zero, or text), Excel shouldn’t display it. You can add information to the cell (and see it in the formula bar), but it doesn’t appear on the worksheet or in your printouts.

Text format strings Good news: Text format strings are extremely simple. Usually, you use a text format string to repeatedly insert the same text in a large number of cells. For example, you may want to add the word NOTE before a collection of entries. To do this, your format string needs to define the literal text you want to use—in this case, the word “NOTE”—and place the text within quotation marks (including any spaces you wish to appear). Use the @ symbol to indicate which side of the string the cell contents should go. For example, if you set the format string: ″NOTE: ″@

and then you type Transfer payment into the cell, Excel displays it as NOTE: Transfer payment. However, if the cell is completely empty it stays blank, and Excel doesn’t add the NOTE text.

Formatting Cell Appearance Formatting cell values is important, because it helps maintain consistency among your numbers. But to really make your spreadsheet readable (and even beautiful), you’ll need to enlist some of Excel’s tools for controlling things like alignment, color, and borders and shading. You can format a cell’s appearance in two ways. You can find the button you need on the Home tab of the ribbon, or you can go back to the more comprehensive Format Cells dialog box. Just select the single cell or group of cells that you want to work with, and then choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells. Or, right-click the selection, and then choose Format Cells. The following sections walk you through the options in the Format Cells dialog box. Tip: Even a small amount of formatting can make a worksheet easier to interpret by drawing the viewer’s eye to important information. Of course, as with formatting a Word document or designing a web page, a little goes a long way. Don’t feel the need to bury your worksheet in exotic colors and styles just because you can.

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Alignment and Orientation As you learned in the previous chapter, Excel automatically aligns cells according to the type of information you’ve entered. But what if this automatic alignment isn’t what you want? Fortunately, in the Format Cells dialog box, the Alignment tab lets you easily change alignment as well as control some other interesting settings, like the ability to rotate text. Excel lets you control the position of content between a cell’s left and right borders, known as the horizontal alignment. Excel offers the following choices for horizontal alignment, some of which are shown in Figure 5-10: • General is the standard type of alignment; it aligns cells to the right if they hold numbers or dates and to the left if they hold text. You learned about this type of alignment in Chapter 2. • Left (Indent) tells Excel to always line up content with the left edge of the cell. You can also choose an indent value to add some extra space between the content and the left border. • Center tells Excel to always center content between the left and right edges of the cell. • Right (Indent) tells Excel to always line up content with the right edge of the cell. You can also choose an indent value to add some extra space between the content and the right border. • Fill copies content multiple times across the width of the cell, which is almost never what you want. • Justify is the same as Left if the cell content fits on a single line. When you insert text that spans more than one line, Excel justifies every line except the last one, which means Excel adjusts the space between words to try and ensure that both the right and left edges line up. • Center Across Selection is a bit of an oddity. When you apply this option to a single cell, it has the same effect as Center. If you select more than one adjacent cell in a row (for example, cell A1, A2, A3), this option centers the value in the first cell so that it appears to be centered over the full width of all cells. However, this happens only as long as the other cells are blank. This setting may confuse you a bit at first, because it can lead to cell values being displayed over cells in which they aren’t stored. Another approach to centering large text titles and headings is to use cell merging (as described in the box on page 162), but Excel purists prefer Center Across Selection, because it doesn’t muck with the worksheet’s structure. • Distributed (Indent) is the same as Center—if the cell contains a numeric value or a single word. If you add more than one word, then Excel enlarges the spaces between words so that the text content fills the cell perfectly (from the left edge to the right edge).

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Vertical alignment controls the position of content between a cell’s top and bottom border. Vertical alignment becomes important only if you enlarge a row’s height so that it becomes taller than the contents it contains. To change the height of a row, click the bottom edge of the row header (the numbered cell on the left side of the worksheet), and drag it up or down. As you resize the row, the content stays fixed at the bottom. The vertical alignment setting lets you adjust the cell content’s positioning. Excel gives you the following vertical alignment choices, some of which are shown in Figure 5-10: • Top tells Excel that the first line of text should start at the top of the cell. • Center tells Excel to center the block of text between the top and bottom border of the cell. • Bottom tells Excel that the last line of text should end at the bottom of the cell. If the text doesn’t fill the cell exactly, then Excel adds some padding to the top. • Justify is the same as Top for a single line of text. When you have more than one line of text, Excel increases the spaces between each line so that the text fills the cell completely from the top edge to the bottom edge. • Distributed is the same as Justify for multiple lines of text. If you have a single line of text, this is the same as Center. Figure 5-10: Top: Horizontal alignment options in action. Bottom: This sheet shows how vertical alignment and cell wrapping work with cell content.

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If you have a cell containing a large amount of text, you may want to increase the row’s height so you can display multiple lines. Unfortunately, you’ll notice that enlarging a cell doesn’t automatically cause the text to flow into multiple lines and fill the newly available space. But there’s a simple solution: just turn on the “Wrap text” checkbox (on the Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box). Now, long passages of text flow across multiple lines. You can use this option in conjunction with the vertical alignment setting to control whether Excel centers a block of text, or lines it up at the bottom or top of the cell. Another option is to explicitly split your text into lines. Whenever you want to insert a line break, just press Alt+Enter, and then start typing the new line. Tip: After you’ve expanded a row, you can shrink it back by double-clicking the bottom edge of the row header. Assuming you haven’t turned on text wrapping, this action shrinks the row back to its standard single-line height.

Finally, the Alignment tab lets you rotate content in a cell up to 180 degrees, as shown in Figure 5-11. You can set the number of degrees in the Orientation box on the right of the Alignment tab. Rotating cell content automatically changes the size of the cell. Usually, you’ll see it become narrower and taller to accommodate the rotated content. Figure 5-11: Here’s a worksheet that shows one of Excel’s most commonly used formatting tricks (merged cells), along with one of its most exotic (rotated text).

Merged cells (A1 to C1) Rotated text

More merged cells (B7 to D8)

Tip: You can use the Home➝Alignment section of the ribbon to quickly change alignment, indenting, rotation, and wrapping, without opening the Format Cells dialog box.

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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Shrinking Text and Merging Cells So You Can Fit More Text into a Cell I’m frequently writing out big chunks of text that I’d love to scrunch into a single cell. Do I have any options other than text wrapping? You betcha. When you need to store a large amount of text in one cell, text wrapping is a good choice. But it’s not your only option. You can also shrink the size of the text or merge multiple cells, both from the Format Cells dialog box’s Alignment tab. To shrink a cell’s contents, select the “Shrink to fit” checkbox. Be warned, however, that if you have a small column that doesn’t use wrapping, this option can quickly reduce your text to vanishingly small proportions. Joining multiple cells together removes the cells’ shared borders and creates one mega-sized cell. Usually, you’ll do this to accommodate a large amount of content that can’t

fit in a single cell (like a long title that you want to display over every column). For example, if you merge cells A1, B1, and C1, you end up with a single cell named A1 that stretches over the full width of the A, B, and C columns, as shown in Figure 5-11. To merge cells, select the cells you want to join, choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells, and then, on the Alignment tab, turn on the “Merge cells” checkbox. There’s no limit to how many cells you can merge. (In fact, you can actually convert your entire worksheet into a single cell if you want to go crazy.) And if you change your mind, don’t worry—you simply need to select the single merged cell, choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells again, and then turn off the “Merge cells” checkbox to redraw the original cells.

Fonts and Color As in almost any Windows program, you can customize the text in Excel, applying a dazzling assortment of colors and fancy typefaces. You can do everything from enlarging headings to colorizing big numbers. Here are the individual font details you can change: • The font style. (For example, Arial, Times New Roman, or something a little more shocking, like Futura Extra Bold.) Calibri is the standard font for new worksheets. If you have an old-school workbook created by Excel 2003, you’ll notice that it uses 10-point Arial instead. • The font size, in points. The standard point size is 11, but you can choose anything from a minuscule 1-point to a monstrous 409-point. Excel automatically enlarges the row height to accommodate the font. • Various font attributes, like italics, underlining, and bold. Some fonts have complimentary italic and bold typefaces, while others don’t (in which case Windows uses its own algorithm to make the font bold or italicize it). • The font color. This option controls the color of the text. (Page 167 covers how to change the background fill color in a cell.) To change font settings, first highlight the cells you want to format, choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells, and then click the Font tab (Figure 5-12).

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Figure 5-12: Here’s an example of how to apply an exotic font through the Format Cells dialog box. Keep in mind that when displaying data, and especially numbers, sans-serif fonts are usually clearer and look more professional than serif fonts. (Serif fonts have little embellishments, like tiny curls, on the ends of the letters; sans-serif fonts don’t.) Calibri, the default spreadsheet font, is a sans-serif font. Adobe Minion Pro, the font used for the body text of this book, is clearly a serif font, which works best for large amounts of text.

Tip: Thanks to Excel’s handy Redo feature, you can repeatedly apply a series of formatting changes to different cells. After you make your changes in the Format Cells dialog box, simply select the new cell you want to format in the same way, and then hit Ctrl+Y to repeat the last action.

Rather than heading to the Format Cells dialog box every time you want to tweak a font, you can use the ribbon’s handy shortcuts. The Home➝Font section displays buttons for changing the font and font size. You also get a load of tiny buttons for applying basics like bold, italic, and underline, applying borders, and changing the text and background colors. (Truth be told, the formatting toolbar is way more convenient for setting fonts, because its drop-down menu shows a long list of font names, whereas the font list in the Format Cells dialog box is limited to showing an impossibly restrictive six fonts at a time. Scrolling through that cramped space is like reading the phone book on index cards.) Without a doubt, the ribbon’s most useful formatting feature is live preview, a frill that shows you the result of a change before you’ve even applied it. Figure 5-13 shows live preview in action.

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Figure 5-13: Right now, this spreadsheet’s creator is just thinking about using the stylish Baskerville font for this table. However, the moment she hovers over Algerian (higher up in the font list), Excel switches the currently selected cells on the worksheet to that font, providing a preview of the change. The best part: When she moves the mouse pointer away, the formatting disappears instantaneously. To make the changes stick, all she needs to do is click the font. This live preview feature works with font names, font sizes, and colors.

Note: No matter what font you apply, Excel, thankfully, always displays the cell contents in the formula bar in easy-to-read Calibri font. That makes things easier if you’re working with cells that’ve been formatted using difficult-to-decipher script fonts, or really large or small text sizes.

Special characters Most fonts contain not only digits and the common letters of the alphabet, but also some special symbols that you can type directly on your keyboard. One example is the copyright symbol ©, which you can insert into a cell by entering the text (C) and letting AutoCorrect do its work. Other symbols, however, aren’t as readily available. One example is the special arrow character →. To use this symbol, you’ll need the help of Excel’s symbols. Simply follow these steps: 1. Choose Insert➝Symbols➝Symbol. The Symbol dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 5-14. Now it’s time to hunt for the symbol you need.

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POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Formatting Individual Characters The ribbon lets you perform one task that you can’t with the Format Cells dialog box: applying formatting to just a part of a cell. For example, if a cell contains the text “New low price”, you could apply a new color or bold format to the word “low.” To apply formatting to a portion of a cell, follow these steps: 1. Move to the appropriate cell, and then put it into edit mode by pressing F2. You can also put a cell into edit mode by doubleclicking it, or by moving to it, and then clicking the text inside the formula bar. 2. Select the text you want to format. You can select the text by highlighting it with the mouse, or by holding down Shift while using the arrow keys to mark your selection.

3. Choose a font option from the ribbon’s Home Font section. You can also change the size, the color, or the bold, italic, or underline settings. And if you don’t want to waste time choosing the Home tab if you’re currently somewhere else in the ribbon, then you can simply right-click the selected text to show a pop-up toolbar with font options. Applying multiple types of text formatting to the same cell can get tricky. The formula bar doesn’t show the difference, and, when you edit the cell, you may not end up entering text in the font you want. Also, be careful that you don’t apply new font formatting to the cell later; if you do, you’ll wipe out all the font information you’ve added to the cell.

Figure 5-14: The Symbol dialog box lets you insert one or more special characters. You can choose extended characters that are supported by most fonts (like currency symbols, non-English letters, arrows, and so on). Alternatively, you can use a font that’s all about fancy characters, like the Wingdings font, which is chock full of tiny graphical icons.

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2. Choose the font and subset (the group of symbols you want to explore). If you’re looking for a fairly common symbol (like a mathematical sign, an arrow, an accented letter, or a fraction), you probably don’t need to change the font. In the Font box, keep the automatic selection of “(normal text)”, and then, from the Subset box at the right, choose the type of default. For example, choose the Arrows subset to see arrow symbols that point in different directions. If you want funkier alternatives, choose a fancy font from the Font box on the left. You should be able to find at least one version of the Wingdings font in the list. Wingdings has the most interesting symbols to use. It’s also the most likely to be on other people’s computers, which makes a difference if you’re planning to email your worksheet to other people. If you get your symbols from a really bizarre font that other people don’t have, they won’t be able to see your symbols. Note: Wingdings is a special font included with Windows that’s made up entirely of symbols like happy faces and stars, none of which you find in standard fonts. You can try to apply the Wingdings font on your own (by picking it from the font list), but you won’t know which character to press on your keyboard to get the symbol you want. You’re better off using Excel’s Symbol dialog box.

3. Select the character, and then click Insert. Alternatively, if you need to insert multiple special characters, just double-click each one; doing so inserts each symbol right next to each other in the same cell without having to close the window. Tip: If you’re looking for an extremely common special character (like the copyright symbol), you can shorten this whole process. Instead of using the Symbols tab, just click over to the Special Characters tab in the Symbol dialog box. Then, look through the small list of commonly used symbols. If you find what you want, just select it, and then click Insert.

There’s one idiosyncrasy that you should be aware of if you choose to insert symbols from another font. For example, if you insert a symbol from the Wingdings font into a cell that already has text, then you actually end up with a cell that has two fonts— one for the symbol character and one that’s used for the rest of your text. This system works perfectly well, but it can cause some confusion. For example, if you apply a new font to the cell after inserting a special character, Excel adjusts the entire contents of the cell to use the new font, and your symbol changes into the corresponding character in the new font (which usually isn’t what you want). These problems can crop up any time you deal with a cell that has more than one font. On the other hand, if you kept the font selection on “(normal text)” when you picked your symbol, then you won’t see this behavior. That’s because you picked a more commonplace symbol that’s included in the font you’re already using for the cell. In this case, Excel doesn’t need to use two fonts at once.

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Note: When you look at the cell contents in the formula bar, you always see the cell data in the standard Calibri font. This consistency means, for example, that a Wingdings symbol doesn’t appear as the icon that shows up in your worksheet. Instead, you see an ordinary letter or some type of extended non-English character, like æ.

Borders and Fills The best way to call attention to important information isn’t to change fonts or alignment. Instead, place borders around key cells or groups of cells and use shading to highlight important columns and rows. Excel provides dozens of different ways to outline and highlight any selection of cells. Once again, the trusty Format Cells dialog box is your control center. Just follow these steps: 1. Select the cells you want to fill or outline. Your selected cells appear highlighted. 2. Select Home➝Cells➝Format➝Format Cells, or just right-click the selection, and then choose Format Cells. The Format Cells dialog box appears. 3. Head directly to the Border tab. (If you don’t want to apply any borders, skip straight to step 4.) Applying a border is a multistep process (see Figure 5-15). Begin by choosing the line style you want (dotted, dashed, thick, double, and so on), followed by the color. (Automatic picks black.) Both these options are on the left side of the tab. Next, choose where your border lines are going to appear. The Border box (the square that contains the word “Text”) functions as a nifty interactive test canvas that shows you where your lines will appear. Make your selection either by clicking one of the eight Border buttons (which contain a single bold horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line), or click directly inside the Border box. If you change your mind, clicking a border line makes it disappear. For example, if you want to apply a border to the top of your selection, click the top of the Border box. If you want to apply a line between columns inside the selection, click between the cell columns in the Border box. The line appears indicating your choice. Tip: The Border tab also provides two shortcuts in the tab’s Presets section. If you want to apply a border style around your entire selection, select Outline after choosing your border style and color. Choose Inside to apply the border between the rows and columns of your selection. Choosing None removes all border lines.

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Figure 5-15: Follow the numbered steps in this figure to choose the line style and color, and then apply the border. In this picture, Excel will apply a solid border between the columns and at the top edge of the selection.

1. Choose the type of border line here

2. Choose the border color here

3. Apply the border where you want it by clicking in here

4. Click the Fill tab. Here you can select the background color, pattern color, and pattern style to apply shading to the cells in the selection (see Figure 5-16). Click the No Color box to clear any current color or pattern in the selected cells. When picking a pattern color, you may notice that certain colors are described as theme colors. These theme colors are a set of coordinated colors that change whenever you pick a new theme for your workbook, as described in on page 174. To get a really fancy fill, you can use a gradient, which is a blend of two colors. For example, with gradients you can create a fill that starts out white on one side of a cell and gradually darkens to blue on the other. To use a gradient fill, click the Fill Effects button, and then follow the instructions in Figure 5-17. 5. Click OK to apply your changes. If you don’t like the modifications you’ve just applied, you can roll back time by pressing Ctrl+Z to trigger the indispensable Undo command.

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2. Choose the pattern color here

1. Choose the background color here

3. Choose the pattern style here

Figure 5-16: Adding a pattern to selected cells is simpler than choosing borders. All you need to do is select the colors you want and, optionally, choose a pattern. The pattern can include a grid, dots, or the diagonal lines shown in this figure.

4. Check the preview

Tip: You can remove a worksheet’s gridlines, which is handy when you want to more easily see any custom borders you’ve added. To remove gridlines, select View➝Show➝Gridlines. (This action affects only the current file, and won’t apply to new spreadsheets.)

Drawing Borders by Hand If you need to add a border around a cell or group of cells, the Format Cells dialog box’s Border tab does the trick (see Figure 5-15). However, you could have a hard time getting the result you want, particularly if you want to add a combination of different borders around different cells. In this situation, you have a major project on your hands that requires several trips back to the Format Cells dialog box.

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1. Choose two colors you want to blend

2. Choose the direction of the shading 3. Choose which color goes on which side

Figure 5-17: Top: To create a gradient, you need to pick the two colors you want to use to create the blend, and you need to choose the way Excel does the blending (from one side to another, from the top to the bottom, and so on). When applying a gradient fill to a stack of cells, a vertical fill makes the most sense, because that way the gradients in each cell line up and look like one seamless shaded region. When applying a gradient fill to a row of cells, a horizontal fill looks better, for the same reason. Bottom: A gradient fill on cells A2 to A5.

Fortunately, there’s a little-known secret that lets you avoid the hassle: Excel’s Draw Border feature. The Draw Border feature lets you draw border lines directly on your worksheet. This process is a little like working with a painting program. You pick the border style, color, and thickness, and then you drag to draw the line between the appropriate cells. When you draw, Excel applies the formatting settings to each affected cell, just as if you’d used the Borders tab. Here’s how it works: 1. Look in the ribbon’s Home➝Font section for the border button. The name of the border button changes to reflect whatever you used it for last. You can most easily find it by its position, as shown in Figure 5-18.

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2. Click the border button, choose Line Style, and then pick the type of line you want. You can use dashed and solid lines of different thicknesses, just as you can in the Format Cells dialog box’s Borders tab. 3. Click the border button, choose Line Color, and then pick the color you want. Now you’re ready to start drawing. 4. Click the border button, and then choose Draw Border. When you choose Draw Border, your mouse pointer changes into a pencil icon. 5. Using the border pencil, click a grid line where you want to place your border (Figure 5-19). You can also drag side to side or up and down to draw a longer horizontal or vertical line. And if you drag your pointer down and to the side, you create an outside border around a whole block of cells. Figure 5-18: The border button is at the bottom left of the Home➝Font section. When you click it, you see a list of commands. Before you draw any borders, it makes sense to customize the border style. For example, you could choose Line Style, as shown here, and for color, you’d choose Line Color.

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Figure 5-19: Here, a double-line border is being drawn between column A and column B.

6. To stop drawing, head back to the border menu, and then choose Draw Border again. If you make a mistake, you can even use an eraser to tidy it all up. Just click the border button, and then choose Erase Border. The mouse pointer changes to an eraser. Now you can click the border you want to remove. Tip: If you don’t want to use the Draw Border feature, you can still make good use of the border button. Just pick a line style and line color, select some cells, and then choose an option from the border menu. For example, if you pick Bottom Border, Excel applies a border with the color and style you chose to the bottom of the current cell selection.

DESIGN TIME

A Designer Worksheet Cells aren’t the only part of a worksheet you can tweak. A little-known feature in Excel lets you change the appearance of the entire worksheet by applying a custom picture as a background. Just select Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Background, and then choose a picture file. The picture can be in just about any format, including GIF, JPEG, BMP, or TIF, and Excel spreads it like tiles across your worksheet surface to fill the whole working area. To try this

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trick out, use some of the background pictures located in your windows folder. (These files usually have names like Feather Texture and Sante Fe Stucco.) The designer background feature’s really just for fun and Excel doesn’t include it in the printout. To remove a background, just choose Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Delete Background.

chapter

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I

n the previous chapter, you took a comprehensive tour of Excel’s formatting fundamentals. But of course, just because the features exist doesn’t mean they’re easy to use. Digging through the different options and applying a full range of formatting settings can be a tedious task. Fortunately, Excel also includes a few timesavers that let you speed up many formatting jobs. In this chapter, you’ll try out the essential formatting techniques that every Excel guru loves. They include: • The Format Painter, which provides a quick and dirty way to transfer formatting from one cell to another. • Styles, which let you standardize your favorite formatting choices so you can use them again. • Themes, which give you a toolkit with a collection of ready-to-use styles that can jazz up the dullest worksheet. • Conditional formatting, which gets Excel to do the hard work of finding values you’re interested in and then highlighting them with custom formatting. Once you master these four timesavers, you’ll have the secret to making great-looking worksheets.

The Format Painter The Format Painter is a simple yet elegant tool that lets you copy all of a cell’s format settings—including fonts, colors, fill, borders, and even the number format—from one cell to another. (Apparently, the Excel team decided that the more accurate label “Format Copier” wasn’t nearly as exciting as the name Format Painter.) 173

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To use the Format Painter, follow these steps: 1. Move to a cell that has the formatting you want to copy. You can use the Format Painter to copy formatting from either one cell or a whole group of cells. For example, you could copy the format from two cells that use different fill colors, and paste that format to a whole range of new cells. The new cells would alternate between the two fill colors. Although this is a powerful trick, in most cases, it’s easiest to copy the format from a single cell. 2. Choose Home➝Clipboard➝Format Painter to switch into “format painting” mode. The pointer changes so that it now includes a paintbrush icon, indicating that Excel is ready to copy the format. 3. Click the cell where you want to apply the format. The moment you release your mouse button, Excel applies the formatting and your pointer changes back to its normal appearance. If you want to copy the selected format to several cells at once, just drag to select a group of cells, rows, or columns, instead of clicking a single cell. Excel doesn’t let you get too carried away with format painting—as soon as you copy the format to a new cell or selection, you exit format painting mode. If you want to copy the desired format to another cell, you must backtrack to the cell that has your format, and start over again. However, there’s a neat trick you can use if you know you’re going to repeatedly apply the same format to a bunch of different cells. Instead of single-clicking the Format Painter button, double-click it. You’ll remain in format painting mode until you click the Format Painter button again to switch it off. Note: The Format Painter is a good tool for quickly copying formatting, but it’s no match for another Excel feature called styles. With styles, you can define a group of formatting settings, and then apply them wherever you need them. Best of all, if you change the style after you’ve created it, Excel automatically updates all cells that you’ve formatted using that style. The next section describes styles in more detail.

Styles and Themes Styles let you create a customized collection of format settings, give that collection a name, and store it in a spreadsheet file. You can then apply these settings anywhere you need them. For example, you could create a style called Great Big Header that uses the Cambria font, pumps up the font size to 46 points, and colors the text bright red. Every Excel spreadsheet starts off with a collection of prebuilt styles. Microsoft designed these styles with two goals in mind: to give you quick access to most common and practical formatting choices, and to make great looking documents. To take a look at the styles waiting for you, choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles. Figure 6-1 shows the gallery of options that you’ll see.

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Note: If your Excel window is very wide, the Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles button disappears, and a scrollable list of styles in the Home➝Styles section is visible instead. This change saves you a click, but doesn’t alter the way that styles work.

Figure 6-1: Excel divides its builtin styles into separate categories, according to how you might use them. The Good, Bad, and Neutral category lets you separate the good news from the bad using the carefully shaded versions of the universal colors red, yellow, and green. The Titles and Headings category adds border formatting (page 167) to make great titles. And the Themed Cell Styles category gives you a range of differently colored, differently shaded cells that are chosen to match harmoniously with one another based on the current workbook theme (page 174).

You can apply more than one style to the same cell to get a combination of formatting options. For example, you could use the Currency style to get the right number format, and then pick the Bad style to flag a huge debt with a light red background fill. (Bad is simply the name of a prebuilt style that applies a light red background fill and a dark red font color.) If you apply more than one style and they conflict (for example, both styles use a different background color), the style you applied last takes over. Styles use Excel’s live preview feature, which gives you try-before-you-buy formatting. When you select a group of cells and then hover over one of the styles in the ribbon, your selected cells change instantaneously to reflect that style. Run your mouse over the different style options, and you see a quickly changing series of different formatting choices. To actually apply a style, click it.

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Note: Longtime Excel fans will recognize the Number Format group of styles shown at the bottom of Figure 6-1. These styles are the only ones that Excel included in previous versions. The Number Format styles simply apply a different number format (page 141), like Currency, Percentage, and so on. They don’t change other appearance details. However, they’re still useful. For example, you could use Currency style for all the dollar figures in your worksheet. Then, at some later point, you could modify that style to set a different currency symbol, alignment, or number of decimal places. This one change updates every cell that uses the Currency style—in this case, all the prices across your entire worksheet.

If this was all that styles offered—a handy way to reuse good-looking formatting presets—they’d still be quite useful. But wait, there’s more: Excel styles come with two more invaluable features. First, you can create your own styles to reuse your own favorite formatting choices. Second, you can use themes to swap one set of styles for another. You’ll learn how both these techniques work in the following sections. TIMESAVING TIP

A Quicker Way to Apply Styles The ribbon makes it fairly easy to work with styles. However, sometimes you may be in the middle of working with another ribbon tab and find it’s just too inconvenient to jump back to the Home tab.

right-click any style, and then choose Add Gallery to Quick Access Toolbar. This adds a Cell Styles button to the Quick Access toolbar, where it’s available at all times. Click this button, and you’ll see the familiar style gallery.

If you’re in this situation, you can make your life more pleasant by adding the style gallery to the Quick Access toolbar. To do so, choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles,

If you get tired of the Cell Styles button on the Quick Access toolbar, right-click it, and then choose Remove from Quick Access Toolbar.

Custom Styles Styles really shine in complex worksheets where you need to apply different formatting to different groups of cells. For example, say you’ve got a worksheet that’s tracking your company’s performance. You’re confident that most of the data is reliable, but know that a few rows come from your notoriously hopeful sales department. To highlight these sales projections, you decide to use a combination of a bold font with a hot pink fill. And since these figures are estimated and aren’t highly precise, you decide to use a number format without decimal places and precede the number with a tilde (~), the universal symbol for “approximately right.” You could implement all these changes manually, but that’ll take fourscore and seven years. Better to set up a style that includes all these settings, and then apply it with a flick of the wrist whenever you need it. Styles are efficiency monsters in a few ways: • They let you reuse your formatting easily, just by applying the style. • They free you from worry about being inconsistent, because the style includes all the formatting you want.

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• Excel automatically saves styles with your spreadsheet file, and you can transfer styles from one workbook to another. • If you decide you need to change a style, you need just a few mouse clicks. Then, Excel automatically adjusts every cell that uses the modified style. Here’s how you create a new style: 1. Begin by moving to a cell in your worksheet that has the formatting you want to use for your style. The quickest way to create a new style is by using formatting you’ve already set up. However, you can also create a new style from scratch. In this case, you’d simply move to a blank, unformatted cell in your worksheet. 2. Select Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles➝New Cell Style. The Style dialog box appears, which lets you design your own styles. 3. In the “Style name” box, type a name for your new style. For example, if you want to create a new style for column titles, enter the style name ColumnTitle. Each style name needs to be unique in your workbook. 4. Choose the style options you want to set. Styles don’t need to set every aspect of a cell. For example, you might want to create a style that applies new font and fill settings, but keeps the current number format (page 141), alignment, and border details. When creating this style, you’d clear the Number, Alignment, and Border checkboxes, so these details aren’t included in your style. Figure 6-2 shows an example. Figure 6-2: Here, a new style, WildAndCrazySalesPeople, is about to be created. This style defines a number format as well as font and fill settings. If you don’t want your style to include some of these settings, turn off the checkmark in the appropriate checkboxes. For example, if you want to create a style that applies a new font, fill, and border, but you want to keep the existing alignment and number format, turn off the Number and Alignment checkboxes. As a general rule, if you don’t need to explicitly set a specific style characteristic, turn off the corresponding checkmark.

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Note: When you select many style checkboxes, you create a pumped-up style that does a lot at once. When you select only one or two style checkboxes, you create a less powerful style, but one that’s more flexible. You can use it in a variety of cells that already have customized formatting, without changing the formatting characteristics you want to keep.

5. Click Format to specify the formatting options for the style. When you click Format, the familiar Format Cells dialog box appears. Use this dialog box to change the formatting just as if you were formatting an individual cell. Click OK to close the Format Cells dialog box when you’re finished. 6. Click OK to close the Style window. Once you’ve created a style, applying it is just a matter of a few mouse clicks. Select the cell or cells you want to modify, choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles, and then choose your style from the list (Figure 6-3).

Figure 6-3: The styles you create appear in a Custom group at the top of the list. (If you haven’t created any styles, you won’t see the Custom group at all.)

Modifying Styles Keep in mind that you can still modify the formatting of a cell after you’ve applied a style. But if you do find yourself overriding a style fairly frequently, and always in the same way, it probably indicates that your style isn’t quite right. Either create more

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than one version of the same style, each with the appropriate settings, or clear some of the style checkboxes so that your style doesn’t apply formatting settings that you commonly change: • To modify a style, choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles, find the style you want in the gallery, right-click it, and then choose Modify. You wind up back at the familiar Style dialog box (Figure 6-2), where you can tweak it to your heart’s content. You can use this approach to revise your own custom styles, or to change the built-in styles that Excel adds to every workbook. • To duplicate a style, choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles, find the style you want in the gallery, right-click it, and then choose Duplicate. The Styles dialog box appears with the style you’ve chosen. Change the formatting as desired, choose a better name, and then click OK to add this style to the Custom category. • To delete a style you don’t want anymore, choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles, find the style, right-click it, and then choose Delete. Excel removes the style formatting from all the cells that used it.

Transferring Styles Between Workbooks Once you’ve created a few useful styles, you’ll probably want to reuse them in a variety of spreadsheet files. In order to reuse them, you need to copy the style information from one workbook to another. Excel makes this process fairly straightforward: 1. Open both files in Excel. You need both the source workbook (the one that has the styles you want to copy) and the destination workbook (the one where you want to copy the styles). 2. Go to the destination workbook. 3. Choose Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles➝Merge Styles. The Merge Styles dialog box appears with a list of all files that you currently have open in Excel. 4. Select the file that has the styles you want to copy into your active workbook, and then click OK. If two or more styles have the same name, Excel prompts you with a warning message, informing you that it will overwrite the current styles with the styles you’re importing. Click OK to continue. You can now use the styles that you’ve imported. These styles are now an independent copy of the styles in the source workbook. If you change the styles in one workbook, you won’t affect the other workbook unless you merge the changed styles back into it.

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Tip: If you want to automatically include your styles in new workbooks, consider creating a template that includes these styles. You can then create new workbooks based on that template. Chapter 16 has the full story.

TIMESAVING TIP

Turning Off Live Preview Most of the time, live preview is a great way for wishywashy spreadsheet writers to see formatting possibilities without committing. However, if you’re using a heavily formatted workbook, you might find the live preview feature slows you down when you’re scrolling through a lot of options. In this case, it might make sense to turn off live preview.

To turn it off, choose File➝Options, and then pick the General section. Under the “User Interface options,” turn off the Enable Live Preview setting, and then click OK. Now you can zip around the ribbon, but you need to actually apply a formatting change (by clicking the appropriate button in the ribbon) before you see what it looks like.

Themes: A Package of Styles As nice as the prebuilt styles are, they don’t suit everyone. For example, the standard style colors favor subdued shades of red, gray, brown, and green, which make sense for the company accountant but aren’t the most exciting choice for an urban hipster. To jazz things up, you can choose a different theme that features livelier colors. When you do, your entire worksheet gets an immediate facelift—you don’t need to track down each individual cell and reformat it. Technically, a theme is a combination of three ingredients: • Fonts. Every theme has one font that’s used for headings and another one that’s used for everything else. These two fonts might be different sizes of the same typeface, or two complementary typefaces. • Colors. Every theme has a palette of 12 complementary colors. The cell styles that appear under the Themed Cell Styles heading (see Figure 6-1) draw upon these colors for text and background fills. Best of all, these colors don’t reflect the preferences of Cheeto-munching programmers. Instead, bona-fide artsy types chose them—in this case, professional designers on the Microsoft payroll. • Effects. Effects are fine alterations that pretty up shapes and other hand-drawn graphics that you can create with Excel’s drawing tools (Chapter 19). If you don’t have any shapes on your worksheet, the effect settings don’t do anything. To choose a theme, choose Page Layout➝Themes➝Themes to see a gallery of choices (Figure 6-4). The secret to understanding themes is realizing how changing the theme affects your worksheet. In other words, how does Excel apply the theme’s fonts, colors, and effects to your worksheet? The following sections break it down.

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Figure 6-4: Every workbook begins using the crowd-pleasing Office theme, but you have a long list of other options. You can even search Microsoft’s Office Online website for hot new themes. As you hover over a new theme, your workbook adjusts itself automatically, thanks to the magic of Excel’s live preview feature.

Fonts Every workbook has a standard body font that it uses in every cell. Excel uses this standard font unless you explicitly choose a different font using the ribbon’s Home➝Font section or the Format Cells dialog box. In a brand new Excel spreadsheet, everything you type starts out in easy-on-the-eyes 11-point Calibri font. If you apply a new theme, you get a new standard font. For example, switch to the traditionally styled Apex theme, and you’ll get the elegant Book Antiqua font instead. Note: All the fonts used in Excel themes are installed as part of Microsoft Office.

The same sort of magic works with the heading font, but it’s more limited—in fact, the only style that uses the heading font is Title. If you use the Title cell style and switch from one theme to another, Excel updates your cell to use the heading font from that style. In some themes, the heading font is the same as the standard body font (as it is for the standard Office theme). In other themes, these two fonts are different, but complementary. For example, the Apex font uses the stylish Lucida Sans font for all titles.

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Note: You might assume that the heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on) use the heading font. Oddly enough, that’s not how it works. All the heading styles use the body font. Title is the only style that uses the heading font.

If you’re feeling a bit reckless, you can override the font that Excel automatically uses for all new workbooks. To override it, select File➝Options, and then choose the General section. Under the “When creating new workbooks” heading is a “Use this font” and a “Font size” setting where you can set the standard font and font size. Ordinarily, the automatic font isn’t set to a specific font at all—instead, it’s set to the special value Body Font. This tells Excel to apply the standard font from the current theme. Usually, this is the choice you want, because it lets you quickly adapt your entire spreadsheet to a theme of your choosing. Colors Every theme relies on 12 key colors. When you move from one theme to another, Excel swaps in the new set of colors. Excel alters any place where you’ve used the 12 theme colors. However, other colors aren’t affected. Note: Although each theme has only 12 base colors, Excel varies the saturation of the color to make it bolder or lighter, based on the style you use. For example, the Office theme includes a steel blue color that you can use at full strength (with the style named Accent 1) or lighten to a faint gray-blue mist (with the style named 20% - Accent 1).

To make this system a bit clearer, imagine that a designer runs amok, formatting cells with different background fills. He fills some of the cells with theme colors, and others with custom colors. (Figure 6-5 shows the difference.) When you switch themes, the cells that have the theme colors are changed, while the other cells aren’t. Figure 6-5: When you set the background fill in a cell, you can pick one of the theme colors (at different saturations), you can use a standard color (which gives you the standard redgreen-blue lineup), or you can click More Colors to pick a custom color of your own design. You have the same choices when picking the foreground color for your text.

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Tip: You’re always better off using theme colors rather than picking a new custom color. That way you can give your workbook a facelift simply by switching from one theme to another, and the colors will still match. Also, if you choose custom colors that look nice with a specific theme, they’re likely to clash horribly when you change to another theme.

Experienced Excel workers rarely waste time picking background and foreground colors out of the ribbon. Instead, they use styles. Any time you use one of the styles from the Themed Cell Styles category (Home➝Styles➝Cell Styles; see Figure 6-1), you’re applying a theme-specific color. As a result, if you pick another theme, all the themed cell styles change to use the new color. The theme system works well because each color in a theme plays a specific role. In other words, some colors are intended for text, while others are designed to play the role of a complementary background; a few more add eye-catching accents. To see the intended purpose of each color, hover over it in the ribbon (Figure 6-6). Text and background 2 Accents

Figure 6-6: Here, the mouse is over one of the six accent colors that are present in every theme. You can also choose from four colors that are intended for standard text and background fills (on the left).

Text and background 1 Choose a lighter or darker version of your color from the boxes underneath

Effects Effects are the simplest part of any theme, because Excel applies them with no work on your part (all you need to do is switch themes, and then the Effects kick in). Excel automatically applies effects to any graphics you’ve created. You’ll learn more about creating shapes and other illustrations in Chapter 19.

Modifying Themes Excel gives you the ability to use just part of a theme. For example, what if you want the casual fonts from the Office theme but want to use them in conjunction with the rich reds of the Opulent theme? The Excel designers might cringe at your

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combination, but there’s no reason for you to hesitate—from the Page Layout➝ Themes➝Themes gallery, just choose the Office theme, and then, from the Page Layout➝Themes➝Colors list, pick the Opulent colors (Figure 6-7). Figure 6-7: Using the ribbon, you can apply just the colors (as shown here), just the fonts, or just the effects from a theme of your choosing. This technique lets you mix and match different theme parts (which is a bit of a no-no for the artistically minded).

A more interesting possibility is the way Excel lets you create a brand new custom theme with your own personalized combination of colors and fonts. Here’s how: 1. From the Page Layout➝Themes➝Themes gallery, choose the theme you want to use as a starting point. 2. Choose your favorite body and heading font by going to Page Layout➝ Themes➝Fonts➝Create New Theme Fonts. The Create New Theme Fonts dialog box appears (Figure 6-8). Figure 6-8: The Create New Theme Fonts dialog box doesn’t let you choose font sizes, but you can pick two complementary typefaces: one for body text and one for headings. Before you click Save, enter a descriptive new name.

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3. Choose your fonts, enter a name for your font combination (like “Informal”), and then click Save. Your font selection appears in the Page Layout➝Themes➝Font list, so you can use it with any theme. 4. Choose your favorite colors by going to Page Layout➝Themes➝Colors➝ Create New Theme Colors. The Create New Theme Colors dialog box appears (Figure 6-9). Figure 6-9: The Create New Theme Colors dialog box shows all 12 theme colors, and lets you adjust each one. Microsoft designed the first two colors for use together as foreground and background colors. The second two colors offer an alternate foreground and background pair. The next six are accented colors for cell backgrounds to highlight important values, and the final two colors are for use with Web-style links (page 90). As you adjust colors, Excel updates the tiny preview pictures.

5. Choose your colors, enter a name for your color combination (like “Wacky Office Temp”), and then click Save. Your new color palette appears in the Page Layout➝Themes➝Colors list, so you can use it with any theme. 6. Optionally, save your work to a .thmx file by choosing Page Layout➝ Themes➝Themes➝Save Current Theme. If you want to reuse your theme in other workbooks (or share it with friends), you can save your fonts and colors as a .thmx theme file. To apply your custom theme later on, just choose Page Layout➝Themes➝Themes➝Browse for Themes, browse to your .thmx file, and then choose it.

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POWER USERS’ CLINIC

Different Office Programs, Same Good Style Excel shares its theming system with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. That means you can create a .thmx theme file in Excel, and then use it to set document colors in Microsoft Word, or vice versa. That way, you can create memos in Word, presentations in PowerPoint, and reports in Excel that share the same hot colors. In fact, you don’t even need to create a .thmx file to use this feature (although it’s always a good idea). Your

theme settings are stored directly in your document file, whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx), a Word document (.docx), or a PowerPoint slide deck (.pptx). To pull theme settings directly out of one of these files and place them in your current Excel spreadsheet, choose Page Layout➝Themes➝Themes➝Browse for Themes, and then select the file whose theme you want to use.

Conditional Formatting A good worksheet highlights the most important information, thereby making it easy to spot. For example, if you look at a worksheet that shows the last year of a company’s sales, you want to be able to find underperforming products without having to hunt through hundreds of cells. And even if you’re not using Excel in the business world, you still need to home in on key details in a spreadsheet—whether it’s a budget-busting dinner in your monthly expense worksheet or a skipped week at the gym in your exercise log. All too often, these essential details are buried in an avalanche of data. As you learned in Chapter 5, you can use formatting tricks to make important data stand out from the crowd. But the problem with formatting is that it’s up to you to track down the cells that need to be formatted. Not only is this a time-devouring task, you also run into trouble when you start using formulas (as discussed on page 227). Formulas let you set up elaborate calculations that link cells together, which means that a change to a single cell can cascade through your worksheet, altering data everywhere else. If you’re highlighting important information by hand, you just might need to repeat the whole formatting process each time a value changes. Fortunately, Excel has a feature that’s designed to spare you the drudgery. It’s called conditional formatting, and it lets Excel automatically find and highlight important information. In this section, you’ll learn to master conditional formatting to make sure important bits of data stick out for all to see. Note: In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use basic conditional formatting, which applies the formatting settings you learned about in Chapter 5 to make important cells stand out. In Chapter 20, you’ll learn about three more advanced types of conditional formatting that build on this system: data bars, color scales, and icon sets. They let you use other graphical tricks (like shaded bars and tiny pictures) to give a graphical representation of different values.

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The Basics of Conditional Formatting In Chapter 5, you learned how to create custom format strings. As you saw, Excel lets you create up to three different format strings for the numbers in a single cell (page 187). For example, you can define a format string for positive numbers, a format string for negative numbers, and another format string for zero values. Using this technique, you could create a worksheet that automatically highlights negative numbers in red lettering while leaving nonnegative numbers in black. This ability to treat negative numbers differently from positive numbers is quite handy, but it’s obviously limited. For example, what if you want to flag extravagant expenses that top $100, or you want to flag a monthly sales total if it exceeds the previous month’s sales by 50 percent? Custom format strings can’t help you there, but conditional formatting fills the gap. With conditional formatting, you set a condition that, if true, prompts Excel to apply additional formatting to a cell. This new formatting can change the text color, or use some of the other formatting tricks you saw in Chapter 5, including modifying fill colors and fonts. You can also use other graphical tricks, like data bars (shaded bars that grow or shrink based on the number in a cell) and icons.

Highlighting Specific Values One of the simplest ways to use conditional formatting is to use a little formatting razzle-dazzle to highlight important values. For example, consider the daily calorie intake log shown in Figure 6-10. Figure 6-10: This worksheet tracks the calorie intake of Carolynne, the pet llama, over several weeks. Carolynne’s owners have noticed a dramatic weight gain over the same period, but they’re at a loss to pinpoint exactly when the overeating took place. Fortunately, conditional formatting can highlight the problem areas.

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To apply conditional formatting, select the cells that you want to examine and format. Next, you need to pick the right conditional formatting rule. A rule is an instruction that tells Excel when to apply conditional formatting to a cell and when to ignore it. For example, a typical rule might state, “If the cell value is greater than 10,000, apply bold formatting.” Excel has a wide range of conditional formatting rules, and they fall into two categories (each of which has a separate menu): • Highlight specific values. If your cell contains numbers or dates, you can set a minimum, a maximum, or a range of values that you want Excel to highlight. In the case of text, you can highlight cells that contain certain specific text, start with specific text, and so on. In the case of dates, you can pick out dates that fall within certain ranges (last week, last month, next week, and so on). To see all your choices, choose Home➝Styles➝Conditional Formatting➝Highlight Cells Rules. • Highlight values based on where they fall in a series. These options get Excel to highlight the top values, bottom values, or values that fall above or below average. To see your choices, choose Home➝Styles➝Conditional Formatting➝Top/Bottom Rules. For example, here’s how you can quickly pick out big eating days in the llama food table (Figure 6-10): 1. In the Caloric Intake column, select the cells. Click the C column’s header to select the whole column. 2. Choose Home➝Styles➝Conditional Formatting➝Highlight Cells Rules➝ Greater Than. A dialog box appears where you can set the cutoff number and the formatting (Figure 6-11). Figure 6-11: Each time Carolynne the llama eats more than 10,000 calories, Excel highlights the cell with a yellow shaded background.

3. Set your minimum value in the text box on the left. In this case, use 10000.

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Note: Usually, conditional formatting compares a cell value to a fixed number. However, you can also create conditions that compare the cell value to other cells in your worksheet. To take this step, select the text box where you’d normally enter the comparison number, and then click the worksheet to select the cell that Excel should use. Excel automatically inserts a cell reference (like $D$2 for cell D2) into the box.

4. Choose the type of formatting from the list box on the right. You can choose from several presets (like Red Text, Red Border, Red Fill with Dark Red Text, and so on), or you can define your own formatting. To define your own format settings, choose Custom Format. An abbreviated version of the Format Cells dialog box appears. A few settings are turned off, because you can’t apply them conditionally. For example, you can’t conditionally change the font or font size, but you can conditionally set other font characteristics like the use of bold, italic, and underline. Aside from these limitations, the tabs are exactly the same as the ones you’re familiar with from the full-blown Format Cells dialog box (page 139). Click OK when you’re finished choosing your format options. Note: Imaginative Excel fans can do a lot with the Format Cells dialog box and conditional formatting. For example, you can highlight specific values by drawing a border around them, adding a different color fill, or changing the number format to add more decimal places.

5. Click OK. As soon as you click OK, Excel evaluates the conditions and adjusts the formatting as needed. Every time you open your spreadsheet, or change the value in one of the conditional cells, Excel evaluates the condition and adds or removes the formatting as required. Figure 6-12 shows the result. Tip: To remove any type of conditional formatting, select your cells, and then choose Home➝Styles➝ Conditional Formatting➝Clear Rules➝Clear Rules from Selected Cells. You can also use Home➝ Styles➝Conditional Formatting➝Clear Rules➝Clear Rules from Entire Sheet to wipe all the conditional formatting from your entire worksheet.

The ribbon is packed with useful conditional formatting choices. However, a few possibilities don’t appear in the Highlight Cells Rules and Top/Bottom Rules lists. To see every choice, you can create your conditional formatting rule by hand. Just choose Home➝Styles➝Conditional Formatting➝New Rule. You see the New Formatting Rule dialog box (Figure 6-13).

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Figure 6-12: Now Carolynne’s days of indulgence stand out. The highlights you see here are a result of the settings applied in “Every time the calorie value tops 10,000, Excel adds a yellow background.”

Figure 6-13: The New Formatting Rule dialog box has two sections. The top portion of the window lets you choose the type of rule. (Ignore the first rule, “Format all cells based on their values,” because that’s used for data bars, color scales, and icon sets—three features you’ll consider a little later in this chapter.) The bottom section lets you define all the rule settings. In this example, a new rule is being created that formats any cell with a value greater than 10,000.

The New Formatting Rule dialog box is surprisingly intuitive (translation: it’s not just for tech jockeys). The “Format only cells that contain” rule is by far the most versatile. It lets you pick out specific numbers, dates, blank cells, cells with errors, and so on. Most people find this formatting rule satisfies most of their conditional formatting needs.

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Two rules work well with values that change frequently; these are “Format only top or bottom ranked values” and “Format only values that are above or below average.” Both of these rules pick out values that stand out in relationship to the others. For example, if you didn’t know that 10,000 calories is the threshold for llama overeating, you might use one of these rules to pick the largest meals, as shown in Figure 6-14. Figure 6-14: Top: This rule picks out the top 10 percent of all values. Bottom: This rule picks out values that are one standard deviation above average. Both rules format the highest values, without your actually needing to know what these values are.

These rules are the foundation of conditional formatting. In the following sections, you’ll learn about three more specialized conditional formatting features that use unique formatting to distinguish between different values.

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Using Multiple Rules So far, you’ve seen examples that use only one conditional formatting rule. However, there’s actually no limit to the number of conditional formatting rules you can use at the same time. (Older versions of Excel don’t have the same ability—they top out at three conditions.) Excel gives you two basic ways to use multiple rules: • You can create rules that format different subsections of data. This lets you apply several different layers of conditional formatting to highlight different values. • You can create rules that overlap. For example, you can highlight the top five values with red lettering and values above 10,000 with bold. If one of the top five values has a value above 10,000, it gets the combined formatting settings, and Excel displays it in bold red. If you use conditional rules that overlap, there’s always the possibility of conflict. For example, one conditional formatting rule might apply a red background fill while another sets a yellow background fill. If both these rules affect the same cell, only one can win. In this situation, it all depends on the order in which Excel applies conditional formatting rules. If there’s a conflict, rules that are applied later override the rules it applied earlier. Ordinarily, Excel applies rules in the same order that you created them, but if this isn’t what you want, you can change the order using the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager, which is shown in Figure 6-15. To get to the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager, select one of the cells that uses the conditional formatting, and then choose Home➝Styles➝Conditional Formatting➝Manage Rules. Figure 6-15: To reorder a rule, select it, and then click the up or down arrow button (circled). Excel applies the rules at the top of the list first. In this example, Excel applies the Cell Value > 10000 rule before the Top 5 rule. As a result, the Top 5 rule formatting may override the Cell Value > 10000 formatting, if they conflict.

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Note: Ordinarily, the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager shows only the conditional formatting rules that apply to the currently selected cell (or cells). However, you can choose a specific worksheet in the “Show formatting rules for” list to see everything that’s defined on that worksheet. Now you have a nice way to review all the conditional formatting rules that you’ve created, but it can be a little confusing. When showing all the formatting on a worksheet, it’s important to remember that the order of rules isn’t important if the rules apply to different sets of cells.

The Conditional Formatting Rules Manager isn’t just for reordering your rules. It also lets you: • Create rules (click New Rule) • Modify rules (select a rule in the list, and then click Edit Rule) • Delete rules (select a rule, and then click Delete Rule) Finally, there’s one easily overlooked gem: the Stop If True column. You can use this setting to tell Excel to stop evaluating conditional formatting rules for a cell. This setting is a handy way to limit where Excel shows data bars, color scales, and icon sets. For example, imagine you create two rules: a Top 5 rule that gives cells a black background and white bold text, and a Cell Value > 10000 rule that gives cells red text. If you put the Top 5 rule first and switch on Stop If True setting, you ensure that the rules will never overlap. If a cell value is both in the Top 5 and greater than 10000, it will get only the Top 5 formatting—which is good, because red text is difficult to read on a black background.

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T

he previous chapters have given you all the tools you need to create nicely formatted worksheets. While this is all well and good, these features can quickly bury you in an avalanche of data. If you want to see more than one part of your workbook at once, or if you want an overview of the entire worksheet, then you must seize control of Excel’s viewing features. These features include zooming (which lets you magnify cells or just fit more information into your Excel window), panes (which let you see more than one part of a worksheet at once), and freezing (which lets you keep certain cells visible at all times). This chapter teaches you how to use these tools, store a custom view, and even save a workspace (a configuration that lets you edit multiple files in one window).

No matter what your worksheets look like on a screen, sometimes the best way to review them is in print. The second half of this chapter tackles printing your worksheets. You’ll learn Excel’s basic printing options and a few tricks that can help you preview page breaks and make sure large amounts of data get divided the way you want.

Controlling Your View So far, most of the worksheets in this book have included only a small amount of data. But as you cram your worksheets with dozens of columns, and hundreds or even thousands of rows, editing becomes much trickier. The most challenging problems are keeping track of where you are in an ocean of information and making sure the data you want stays visible. Double that if you have multiple large worksheets in one workbook.

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The following sections introduce the basic tools you can use to view your data, along with a few tips for managing large worksheets.

Zooming Excel’s zoom feature lets you control how much data you’ll see in the window. When you reduce the zoom percentage—say, from 100 percent to 10 percent—Excel shrinks your cells, letting you see more of them at once, which also makes it harder to read the data. Very small zoom percentages are ideal for looking at the overall layout of a worksheet. When you increase the zoom percentage—say, from 100 percent to 200 percent—Excel magnifies your cells, letting you see more detail but fewer cells. Larger zoom percentages are good for editing. Note: Excel lets you zoom in to 500 percent and out all the way to 10 percent.

You can most easily adjust the zoom percent by using the zoom slider in the bottomright part of the Status bar. The zoom slide also displays the current zoom percentage. But if you want to specify the exact zoom percentage by hand (say, 142 percent), then you can choose View➝Zoom➝Zoom (or click the zoom percentage next to the zoom slider). A Zoom dialog box appears (shown in Figure 7-1). Figure 7-1: Using the Zoom dialog box, you can select a preset zoom percentage or, in the Custom box, type in your own percentage. However, using the Zoom slider (on the Status bar’s right side) is almost always faster than making frequent trips to the Zoom dialog box.

The standard zoom setting is 100 percent, although other factors like the size of the font you’re using and the size and resolution of your computer screen help determine how many cells fit into Excel’s window. As a rule of thumb, every time you double the zoom, Excel cuts in half the number of rows you can see. Thus, if you can see 20 rows at 100 percent, then you’ll see 10 rows at 200 percent. Note: Changing the zoom affects how your data appears in the Excel window, but it won’t have any effect on how your data is printed or calculated.

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You can also zoom in on a range of cells. When your data extends beyond the edges of your monitor, this handy option lets you shrink a portion to fit your screen. Conversely, if you’ve zoomed out to get a bird’s eye view of all your data, and you want to swoop in on a particular section, Excel lets you expand a portion to fit your screen. To zoom in on a group of cells, first select some cells (Figure 7-2), and then choose View➝Zoom➝Zoom to Selection (Figure 7-3). (You can perform this same trick by highlighting some cells, opening the Zoom dialog box, and then choosing “Fit selection.”) Make sure you select a large section of the worksheet—if you select a small group, you’ll end up with a truly jumbo-sized zoom. Figure 7-2: To magnify a range of cells, select them, as shown here, and then choose View➝Zoom➝Zoom to Selection to have Excel expand the range to fill the entire window, as shown in Figure 7-3.

Figure 7-3: Here, Excel increased the zoom to 97 percent (from 57 percent in Figure 7-2).

Tip: If you’re using a mouse with a scroll wheel, then you can zoom with the wheel. Just place the mouse pointer over the worksheet (anywhere will do), hold down the Ctrl key, and roll the scroll wheel up (to zoom in) or down (to zoom out).

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GEM IN THE ROUGH

Filling the Screen with Cells If you really want to see the maximum number of cells at once, Excel provides a little-known feature that strips away the ribbon, the formula bar, and all other extraneous screen elements, making more room for cells. To make the switch, choose View➝Workbook Views➝Full Screen. To return things to the way they were, right-click anywhere on the worksheet grid, and then choose Close Full Screen (or just press Esc). Most people find that Full Screen mode is just a little too drastic. Another good option is to collapse the ribbon, which reclaims a significant portion of screen real estate.

To do so, in the ribbon, double-click any tab title. Excel hides the ribbon surface, but leaves just the tab titles above your worksheet. Even when the ribbon is collapsed, you can still use it—just click a tab title (which pops that tab back into view), and then click the command you want. The ribbon disappears again as soon as you’re done. If you’re an unredeemed keyboard lover, then you can use the ribbon in the same way whether it’s collapsed or expanded. Just press Alt, and then follow the KeyTips (page 5). And if you get tired of the collapsed ribbon, you can double-click any tab title or press Ctrl+F1 to show the full ribbon once again.

Viewing Distant Parts of a Spreadsheet at Once Zooming is an excellent way to survey a large expanse of data or focus on just the important cells, but it won’t help if you want to simultaneously view cells that aren’t near each other. For example, if you want to focus on both row 1 and row 138 at the same time, then zooming won’t help. Instead, try splitting your Excel window into multiple panes—separate frames that each provide a different view of the same worksheet. You can split a worksheet into two or four panes, depending on how many different parts you want to see at once. When you split a worksheet, each pane contains an identical replica of the entire worksheet. When you make a change to the worksheet in one pane, Excel automatically applies the same change in the other panes. The beauty of panes is that you can look at different parts of the same worksheet at once. You can split a window horizontally or vertically (or both). When you want to compare different rows in the same worksheet, use a horizontal split. To compare different columns in the same worksheet, use a vertical split. And if you want to be completely crazy and see four different parts of your worksheet at once, then you can use a horizontal and a vertical split—but that’s usually too confusing to be much help. Excel gives you two ways to split the windows. Here’s the easy way: 1. Find the splitter controls on the right side of the screen. Figure 7-4 shows you where to find them.

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Horizontal splitter bar

Figure 7-4: Every Excel window contains both horizontal and vertical splitter controls.

Vertical splitter bar

2. Drag either control to split the window into two panes. As you drag, Excel displays a gray bar showing where it’ll divide the window. Release the splitter control when you’re happy with the layout. (At this point, you don’t need to worry about whether you can actually view the data you want to compare; you’re simply splitting up the window.) If you want to split the window into an upper and lower portion, drag the vertical control down to the location where you want to split the window. If you want to split the window into a left and right portion, drag the horizontal control leftwards—to the location where you want to split the window. Note: If for any reason you do want to split the window into four panes, use both controls. The order you follow isn’t important.

If you don’t like the layout you’ve created, simply move the splitter bars again by dragging them, just as you did before.

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3. Within each pane, scroll to the cells you want to see. For example, if you have a 100-row table that you split horizontally in order to compare the top five rows and the bottom five rows, scroll to the top of the upper pane, and then scroll to the bottom of the lower pane. (Again, the two panes are replicas of each other; Excel is just showing you different parts of the same worksheet.) Using the scroll bars in panes can take some getting used to. When the window is split in two panes, Excel synchronizes scrolling between both panes in one direction. For example, if you split the window into top and bottom halves, Excel gives you just one horizontal scroll bar (at the bottom of the screen), which controls both panes (Figure 7-5). Thus, when you scroll to the left or right, Excel moves both panes horizontally. On the other hand, Excel gives you separate vertical scroll bars for each pane, letting you independently move up and down within each pane. Figure 7-5: Here you can see the data in rows 1 through 6 and rows 709 through 715 at the same time. As you move from column to column, both panes move in sync, letting you see, for instance, the phone number information in both panes at once. (You can scroll up or down separately in each pane.)

Tip: If you want the data in one pane—for example, column titles—to remain in place, you can freeze that pane. The next section tells you how.

The reverse is true with a vertical split; in this case, you get one vertical scroll bar and two horizontal bars, and Excel synchronizes both panes when you move up or down. With four panes, life gets a little more complicated. In this case, when you

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scroll left or right, the frame that’s just above or just below the current frame moves, too. When you scroll up or down, the frame that’s to the left or to the right moves with you. Try it out. Note: If you want to remove your panes, just drag the splitter bars back to the edges of the window, or double-click the splitter bar.

You can also create panes by using the ribbon command View➝Window➝Split. When you do, Excel carves the window into four equal panes. You can change the pane sizes as described above, or use View➝Window➝Split again to return to normal. Note: If you use Excel’s worksheet navigation tools—like the Go To and Find commands—all your panes move to the newly found spot. For example, if you use the Find command in one pane to scroll to a new cell, the other panes display the same cell.

Freezing Columns or Rows Excel has another neat trick up its sleeve to help you manage large worksheets: freezing. Freezing is a simpler way to make sure a specific set of rows or columns remains visible at all times. When you freeze data, it remains fixed in place in the Excel window, even as you move to another location in the worksheet in a different pane. For example, say you want to keep visible the first row that contains column titles. When you freeze that row, you can always tell what’s in each column—even when you’ve scrolled down several screenfuls. Similarly, if your first column holds identifying labels, you may want to freeze it so that when you scroll off to the right, you don’t lose track of what you’re looking at. Tip: Excel lets you print out worksheets with a particular row or column fixed in place. Page 217 tells you how.

You can freeze rows at the top of your worksheet, or columns at the left of your worksheet, but Excel does limit your freezing options in a few ways: • You can freeze rows or columns only in groups. That means you can’t freeze column A and C without freezing column B. (You can, of course, freeze just one row or column.) • Freezing always starts at column A (if you’re freezing columns) or row 1 (if you’re freezing rows). That means that if you freeze row 13, Excel also freezes all the rows above it (1 through 12) at the top of your worksheet.

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• If a row or column isn’t visible and you freeze it, you can’t see it until you unfreeze it. For example, if you scroll down so that row 100 appears at the top of the worksheet grid, and then freeze the top 100 rows, you can’t see rows 1 to 99 anymore. This may be the effect you want, or it may be a major annoyance. Note: As far as Excel is concerned, frozen rows and columns are a variation on panes (described earlier). When you freeze data, Excel creates a vertical pane for columns or a horizontal pane for rows. It then fixes that pane so you can’t scroll through it.

To freeze a row or set of rows at the top of your worksheet, just follow these steps: 1. Make sure the row or rows you want to freeze are visible and at the top of your worksheet. For example, if you want to freeze rows 2 and 3 in place, make sure they’re visible at the top of your worksheet. Remember, rows are frozen starting at row 1. That means that if you scroll down so that row 1 isn’t visible, and you freeze row 2 and row 3 at the top of your worksheet, then Excel also freezes row 1—and keeps it hidden so you can’t scroll up to see it. 2. Move to the first row you want unfrozen, and then move left to column A. At this point, you’re getting into position so that Excel knows where to create the freeze. 3. Select View➝Window➝Freeze Panes➝Freeze Panes. Excel splits the worksheet, but instead of displaying a gray bar (as it does when you create panes), it uses a solid black line to divide the frozen rows from the rest of the worksheet. As you scroll down the worksheet, the frozen rows remain in place. To unfreeze the rows, just select View➝Freeze Panes➝Unfreeze Panes. Freezing columns works the same way: 1. Make sure the column or columns you want to freeze are visible and at the left of your worksheet. For example, if you want to freeze columns B and C in place, make sure they’re visible at the edge of your worksheet. Remember, columns are frozen starting at column A. That means that if you scroll over so that column A isn’t visible, and you freeze columns B and C on the left side of your worksheet, Excel also freezes column A—and keeps it hidden so you can’t scroll over to see it. 2. Move to the first column you want unfrozen, and then move up to row 1. At this point, you’re getting into position so that Excel knows where to create the freeze. From library of Wow! eBook 202

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3. Select View➝Window➝Freeze Panes➝Freeze Panes. Excel splits the worksheet, but instead of displaying a gray bar (as it does when you create panes), Excel uses a solid black line to divide the frozen columns from the rest of the worksheet. As you scroll across the worksheet, the frozen columns remain in place. To unfreeze the columns, select View➝Window➝Freeze Panes➝Unfreeze Panes. Tip: If you’re freezing just the first row or the leftmost column, then there’s no need to go through this whole process. Instead, you can use the handy View➝Window➝Freeze Panes➝Freeze Top Row or View➝Window➝Freeze Panes➝Freeze First Column.

You can also freeze columns and rows at the same time, which is useful when you have identifying information that you need to keep visible both on the left and the top of your worksheet. Figure 7-6 shows an example. Figure 7-6: Here, both column A and row 1 are frozen, and thus always remain visible. The easiest way to create these frozen regions is to scroll to the top of the worksheet, position the active cell B2, and choose View➝Window➝ Freeze Panes➝Freeze Panes. Excel then automatically freezes rows above and the columns to the left in separate panes.

Tip: You can also create a horizontal or vertical pane by moving one of the splitter bars, and then freezing that pane. Just drag the splitter bar to the appropriate position, and select View➝Window➝Freeze Panes➝Freeze Panes.

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Hiding Data In some cases, your problem isn’t that you need to keep data visible, but that you need to hide it. For example, say you have a column of numbers that you need only for a calculation but don’t want to see when you edit or print the sheet. Excel provides the perfect solution: hiding rows and columns. Hiding doesn’t delete information; it just temporarily tucks it out of view. You can restore hidden information any time you need it. Technically, hiding a row or column is just a special type of resizing. When you instruct Excel to hide a column, it simply shrinks the column down to a width of 0. Similarly, when you hide a row, Excel compresses the row height. Note: You can also hide an entire worksheet of data. See Chapter 4 for details.

You can hide data in a few ways: • To hide a column, right-click the column header (the letter button on the top of the column), and then choose Hide. Or, put your cursor in any row in that column, and then select Home➝Cells➝Format➝Hide & Unhide➝Hide Columns. • To hide a row, right-click the row header (the number button at the left of the row), and then choose Hide. Or, put your cursor in any column in that row, and then select Home➝Cells➝Format➝Hide & Unhide➝Hide Rows. • To hide multiple rows or columns, just select all the ones you want to disappear before choosing Hide. To unhide a column or row, select the range that includes the hidden cells. For example, if you hid column B, select columns A and C by dragging over the numeric row headers. Then choose Home➝Cells➝Format➝Hide & Unhide➝Unhide Columns (or Unhide Rows). Or just right-click the selection, and then choose Unhide. Either way, Excel makes the missing columns or rows visible, and then highlights them so you can see which information you’ve restored. Tip: To unhide all columns (or rows) in a worksheet, select the entire worksheet (by clicking the square in the top-left corner of the grid), and then select Home➝Cells➝Format➝Hide & Unhide➝Unhide Columns (or Unhide Rows).

Forgetting that you’ve hidden data is as easy as forgetting where you put your keys. While Excel doesn’t include a hand-clapper to help you locate your cells, it does offer a few clues that some of your row numbers or column letters are missing, as shown in Figure 7-7.

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Figure 7-7: This worksheet jumps directly from column A to column O, which tells you that B through N are hidden.

Tip: Excel doesn’t let you hide individual cells. However, Excel gurus use workarounds. The first one is to format the cell so that the text’s white (because white lettering on a white background is invisible). Another solution is to format the cell with the custom number format ;;; (which doesn’t show anything for positive, negative, or text values; see page 150 for more on custom formatting). When you use either of these tricks, you can still see the cell content by moving to the cell and looking in the formula bar.

Saving View Settings If you regularly tweak things like the zoom, visible columns, and the number of panes, you can easily spend more time adjusting your worksheet than editing it. Fortunately, Excel lets you save your view settings with custom views. Custom views let you save a combination of view settings in a workbook. You can store as many custom views as you want. When you want to use a particular view you’ve created, simply select it from a list and Excel applies your settings. Custom views are particularly useful when you frequently switch views for different tasks, like editing and printing. For example, if you like to edit with several panes open and all your data visible, but you like to print your data in one pane with some columns hidden, custom views let you quickly switch between the two layouts. Note: You can’t save a custom view for one worksheet, and then apply it to another.

Custom views can save the following settings: • The location of the active cell. (In other words, your position in the worksheet. For example, if you’ve scrolled to the bottom of a 65,000-row spreadsheet, then the custom view returns you to the active cell in a hurry.) • The currently selected cell (or cells). • Column widths and row heights, including hidden columns and rows. • Split panes (page 198).

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• View settings, like the zoom percentage, which you set using the ribbon’s View tab. • Print settings (page 213), like the page margins. • Filter settings, which affect what information Excel shows in a data list (see Chapter 14). Note: Excel does have one restriction on custom views. You can’t use views with Excel’s tables feature, which is described in Chapter 14. In fact, once you add a table to your worksheet, Excel turns the Custom Views button off.

To create a custom view, follow these steps: 1. Adjust an open worksheet for your viewing pleasure. Set the zoom, hide or freeze columns and rows, and move to the place in the worksheet where you want to edit. 2. Choose View➝Workbook Views➝Custom View. The Custom Views dialog box appears, showing you a list of all the views defined for this workbook. If you haven’t created any yet, this list is empty. 3. Click the Add button. The Add View dialog box appears. 4. Type in a name for your custom view. You can use any name, but consider something that’ll remind you of your view settings (like “50 percent Zoom”), or the task that this view is designed for (like “All Data at a Glance”). A poor choice is one that won’t mean anything to you later (“View One” or “Zoom with a View”) or something obscure like “‘57 Chevy.” The Add View dialog box also gives you the chance to specify print settings or hidden rows and columns that Excel shouldn’t save as part of the view. Turn off the appropriate checkboxes if you don’t want to retain this information. Say you hide column A, but you clear the “Hidden rows, columns, and filter settings” checkbox because you don’t want to save this as part of the view. The next time you restore the view, Excel won’t make any changes to the visibility of column A. If it’s hidden, it stays hidden; if it’s visible, it stays visible. On the other hand, if you want column A to always be hidden when you apply your new custom view, then keep the “Hidden rows, columns, and filter settings” checkbox turned on when you save it. After you’ve typed your view name and dealt with the inclusion settings, click OK to create your new view. Excel adds your view to the list.

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5. Click Close. You’re now ready to use your shiny new view or add another (readjust your settings and follow this procedure again). Applying your views is a snap. Simply select View➝Workbook Views➝Custom Views to return to the Custom Views dialog box (Figure 7-8), select your view from the list, and then click Show. Because Excel stores views with the workbook, they’ll always be available when you open the file, even if you take that file to another computer. Figure 7-8: You can use the Custom Views dialog box to show or delete existing views or to create new ones (click Add, and then follow the procedure from step 4).

Tip: For some examples of custom views in action, visit this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds and download CustomViews.xls, a sample spreadsheet with an array of custom views already set up.

Viewing Multiple Workbooks at Once In its usual state, Excel lets you view only one open workbook file at a time. If you want to compare two or more workbooks, you must switch between them using the Windows taskbar. But this action is a pain, especially if you want to compare two worksheets side-by-side. But Excel does provide a handy tool that lets you place several open workbooks inside one large Excel window, and save your arrangement. This setup is called a custom workspace. With custom workspaces, you can arrange all the workbooks you need for a particular task the way you like them, and then save that arrangement of windows in a special workspace file. Then when it’s time to get back to work on your project, you simply open the workspace file, and Excel restores all the windows exactly the way you left them. Note: You can use a custom workspace to work on different parts of a single workbook at once. However, custom workspaces really come in handy if you need to work on multiples files simultaneously.

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To create and save a workspace, follow these steps: 1. Open all the spreadsheet files you want to make part of your workspace. Close all other Excel files. Should you want different worksheets from the same workbook to be part of your workspace, you must open duplicate versions of the workbook. To do this, go to the workbook and select View➝Window➝New Window. Excel opens a second (or third, or fourth…) window that shows the same workbook. Don’t worry though—any change you make in one window automatically appears in the others, because there’s still just one open workbook. The only way you can tell that you have more than one window open for the same workbook is to look at the title bar of the window, which adds a colon and a number. For example, when you open a second view on MyBeanieBabies.xlsx, you’ll see the window title MyBeanieBabies.xlsx:2. At this point, all your windows appear in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. You can also check which spreadsheets are open (and jump from one to another) using the View➝Window➝Switch Windows list, which shows all the currently open windows. 2. Choose View➝Window➝Arrange All. The Arrange Windows dialog box appears. 3. Choose an Arrange option, and then click OK. Excel gives you four choices for window arranging: • Horizontal, as shown in Figure 7-9, stacks the windows from top to bottom. Excel arranges the windows one above the other, each occupying the full width of the Excel window (similar to when you split a worksheet with the horizontal splitter bar). • Vertical instructs Excel to tile the windows from left to right. • Tiled arranges the windows in a grid pattern whose composition changes depending on the number of files you’re arranging. This option is great if you have a huge monitor. • Cascade layers the windows on top of each other with just a smidge of each window showing. If you open multiple windows on the same workbook, you can select the “Windows of active workbook” option to tell Excel to ignore any other open workbooks.

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Workbook 1 (in the active window)

Figure 7-9: These three spreadsheets have been arranged horizontally. HiddenColumns.xlsx is the active window. To return to the standard, one-file view, just double-click the blue title bar on any window, or click its Maximize button at the right (circled).

Workbook 2

Workbook 3

If you’d like to save a particular set of arranged windows, Excel lets you do so by creating a custom workspace. However, unlike a custom view, you can’t save custom workspaces inside an individual spreadsheet file. Therefore, you must save custom workspaces as separate workspace files, which specify those files you’ve included and the position of their windows. (These files, which use the .xlw file extension, don’t actually contain any of the individual spreadsheet file data.) When you open the custom workspace file, Excel automatically loads all the files you were using and returns them to their original locations. Once you’ve completed the above sequence of steps to create your workspace, you can save it at any time. Just select View➝Window➝Save Workspace, and then choose a file name. You can open a workspace file in the same way you open a spreadsheet: by choosing File➝Open or by double-clicking the file on your desktop or in Windows Explorer. Note: If you ever decide to delete a workspace file, bear in mind that you’re deleting only the information about the customized window arrangement. The individual Excel files themselves are stored separately.

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Workspaces have two minor quirks you should be aware of: • The workspace file stores the location of the Excel files it uses. If you move one of these files somewhere else, the workspace file can’t find it and load it. • If you open a workspace file and then change the window arrangement or open new worksheets, Excel won’t prompt you to save the new workspace settings. Instead, you need to explicitly choose View➝Window➝Save Workspace again. Tip: You can use custom workspaces as a shortcut to open multiple files you want to work on at the same time—even if you don’t want to use Excel’s window-arranging features. To do so, just open all the files into separate windows, and then save the workspace.

Printing Printing in Excel is pretty straightforward—as long as your spreadsheet fits on a normal 8.5×11-inch piece of paper. If you’re one of the millions of spreadsheet owners who don’t belong to that club, welcome to the world of Multiple Page Disorder: the phenomenon in which pages and pages of apparently unrelated and noncontiguous columns start spewing from your printer. Fortunately, Excel comes with a slew of print-tweaking tools designed to help you control what you’re printing. First off, though, it helps to understand the standard settings that Excel uses. Note: You can change most of the settings listed; this is just a list of what happens if you don’t adjust any settings before printing a spreadsheet.

• In the printout, Excel uses all the formatting characteristics you’ve applied to the cells, including fonts, fills, and borders. However, Excel’s gridlines, row headers, and column headers don’t appear in the printout. • If your data is too long (all the rows won’t fit on one page) or too wide (all the columns won’t fit), Excel prints the data on multiple pages. If your data is both too long and too wide, Excel prints in the following order: all the rows for the first set of columns that fit on a printed page, then all the rows for the next set of columns that fit, and so on (this is known as “down, then over”). When printing on multiple pages, Excel never prints part of an individual column or row. • Excel prints your file in color if you use colors and you have a color printer. • Excel sets margins to 0.75 inches at the top and bottom of the page, and 0.7 inches on the left and right sides of the page. Ordinarily, Excel doesn’t include headers and footers (so you don’t see any page numbers). • Excel doesn’t include hidden rows and columns in the printout.

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How to Print an Excel File Excel 2010 uses its backstage view to make printing a whole lot less confusing. Its key feature is a built-in preview that shows you what the on-paper printout will look like before you click Print. If you’re in a tremendous hurry to get your printout and you’re not interested in playing with print settings, just choose File➝Print, and then click the big Print button shown in Figure 7-10. Figure 7-10: When it comes to printing, Excel’s backstage view is a small miracle of efficiency. Not only does it let you tweak the most common print settings, but it also shows you the effect in an instantly updated preview.

If this no-fuss printing approach doesn’t give you the results you want, you need to take a closer look at the print settings you can tweak. Here’s a walkthrough that takes you through all your options: 1. Choose File➝Print (or press Ctrl+P). Excel switches into backstage view, and shows a two-part display that puts printing options on the left and a print preview on the right (Figure 7-10). 2. If you want to print multiple copies of your data, use the Copies box. If you want to print more than one identical copy of your data, change the Copies box accordingly. (This is automatically set at 1 to print a single copy of your work.)

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If you’re printing more than one copy and your worksheet has multiple pages, you should also review the collating setting, which appears further down. This setting determines whether Excel duplicates each page separately. For example, if you print 10 pages and your printout is set to Uncollated, Excel prints 10 copies of page 1, 10 copies of page 2, and so on. If your printout it set to Collated, Excel prints the entire 10-page document, then prints out another copy, and so on. You’ll still end up with 10 copies of each page, but they’ll be grouped together for added convenience. 3. Select a printer from the drop-down list under the Printer heading. Excel automatically selects your regular printer. If you have more than one printer installed and you want to use a different printer, you need to select this printer yourself. You can also adjust printer settings by clicking the Printer Properties link. Every printer has its own set of options here, but common Properties settings include print quality and paper handling (like double-sided printing for those lucky enough to have a printer that supports it). 4. Choose what you want to print from the first list under the Settings heading. Print Active Sheets prints the current worksheet. If you’ve grouped more than one worksheet together using the techniques described on page 125, Excel prints all the selected worksheets, one after the other. Print Entire Workbook prints all the worksheets in your file. Print Selection prints out just a portion of a worksheet. To make this feature work, you need to start by selecting a range of cells, columns, or rows before you start your print out, and then choose File➝Print. 5. If you want to print just some pages, use the two Pages boxes. By default, Excel prints as many pages as it needs to output all the data you’ve chosen to print. Alternately, you can choose a range of pages using the Pages option. For example, you can choose to print only the first three pages by typing 1 into the first box and 3 instead the second. You can also print just the fourth page by printing from 4 to 4. Note: In order to use the “Print range” box effectively, you need to know how many pages you need to print your worksheet and what data will appear on each page. You can step through all the pages in your printout using the handy print preview shown in Figure 7-10.

6. Set the orientation and paper size. Orientation is one of the all-time most useful print settings. It lets you control whether you’re printing on pages that are upright (choose Portrait Orientation) or turned horizontally on their sides (choose Landscape Orientation). If Excel is splitting your rows across multiple pages when you print your worksheet, it

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makes good sense to switch to landscape orientation. That way, Excel prints your columns across a page’s long edge, which accommodates more columns (but fewer rows per page). If you’re fed up with trying to fit all your data on an ordinary sheet no matter which way you turn it, you may be tempted to try using a longer sheet of paper. You can then tell Excel what paper you’ve decided to use by choosing it from the list just under the orientation setting. (Of course, the paper needs to fit into your printer.) Letter is the standard 8.5×11-inch sheet size, while Legal is another common choice—it’s just as wide but comes in a bit longer at 8.5×14 inches. 7. Adjust your margins. Beneath the options for page orientation and paper size is the margin setting, which determines the amount of space between your worksheet content and the edges of the page. You can set the margin setting in two ways. The easiest approach is to pick one of the presets (Normal, Wide, or Narrow), as shown in Figure 7-11. Figure 7-11: Each margin preset includes several numbers. The Top, Bottom, Left, and Right values measure the amount of space between your worksheet content and the top, bottom, left, and right edges of the page, respectively.

For more control, you can choose Custom Margins and fill in your own margin values (Figure 7-12). Logically enough, when you reduce the size of your margins, you can accommodate more information. However, you can’t completely eliminate your margins. Most printers require at least a little space (usually no

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less than 0.25 inches) to grip onto the page, and you won’t be able to print on this part (the very edge of the page). If you try to make the margins too small, Excel won’t inform you of the problem; instead, it’ll just stick with the smallest margin your current printer allows. If you have only a few rows or columns of information, you may want to use one of the “Center on page” options. Select Horizontally to center your columns between the left and right margins. Select Vertically to center your data between the top and bottom of the page. Figure 7-12: Excel allocates space at the top and bottom of your printout for a header or footer (page 220). In this example, the header margin is set to 0.5, which means that any header information will appear half an inch below the top of the page. The top margin is set to 1, meaning the worksheet data will appear one inch below the top of the page. When adjusting either of these settings, be careful to make sure the top margin is always larger than the header margin; otherwise, your worksheet’s data will print on top of your header. The same holds true with footers when changing the bottom margin. (But if you aren’t using headers or footers, their margin settings don’t matter.)

Tip: A good rule of thumb is to adjust margins symmetrically (printouts tend to look nicest that way). Thus, if you shrink the left margin to 0.5, make the same change to the right margin. Generally, if you want to fit more data and you don’t need any header or footer space, then you can safely reduce all your margins to 0.5. If you really want to cram in the maximum amount of data you can try 0.25, but that’s the minimum margin that most printers allow.

8. If you need to shrink your printout and cram more information into each page, pick a scaling option. No matter how drastically you reduce your margins, you’ll only be able to fit a few extra rows and columns in a page. A more powerful approach for fitting

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mass amounts of data into a smaller number of pages is to use scaling. Page 223 gives more detail, but for now, you can try one of the handy scaling presets: • Fit All Columns on One Page squashes your page width-wise, making it narrower. This way, the columns won’t leak off the edge into a separate page. • Fit All Rows on One Page squashes your page height-wise, making it shorter. This way, all your rows will appear on the same page. • Fit Sheet on One Page squashes your page both ways, making sure all your data fits on a single sheet. Note: Excel performs scaling by reducing the font size in the printout. If you try to cram too much data into too small a space, your text might shrink into near-oblivion. It can be hard to judge just how small your text is from the print preview, so you might need to print your worksheet to see how much scaling is too much.

9. If you still want more options, click the Page Setup link. This shows the Page Setup dialog box (Figure 7-13), which holds a few of Excel’s more specialized print settings. The Page Setup dialog box is organized into several tabs. The Page and Margins tabs duplicate settings that are provided elsewhere in backstage view. The Header/Footer tab isn’t the most convenient way to add a header or footer (instead, see page 220). However, the Sheet tab has a number of options you won’t find anywhere else: • Print area lets you specify the range of cells you want to print. While this tool definitely gets the job done, it’s easier to use the Print Area tool (described in the box on page 217). And some people find that the Print dialog box’s Selection setting (step 4) is an easier approach to printing small groups of cells. • Print titles lets you print specific rows at the top of every page, or specific columns on the left side of every page. For example, you could use this setting to print column titles on the top of every page. Note: Due to a strange Excel quirk, you can’t modify the “Print area” or “Print titles” settings while Excel is showing a preview. Instead, you need to close backstage view (just press Esc), head to the Page Layout➝Sheet Options section of the ribbon, and click the dialog box launcher. This shows the same Page Setup dialog box, but with all its options enabled.

• Gridlines prints the grid of lines separating columns and rows that you see on your worksheet.

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• Row and column headings prints the column headers (which contain the column letters) at the top of each page and the row headers (with the row numbers) on the left side of each page. • Black and white tells Excel to render all colors as a shade of gray, regardless of your printer settings. • Draft quality tells Excel to use lower-quality printer settings to save toner and speed up printing—assuming your printer has these features, of course. • Comments lets you print the comments that you’ve added to a worksheet. Excel can either append them to the cells in the printout or add them at the end of the printout, depending on the option you select. For the lowdown on Comments, see page 724. • Cell errors lets you configure how Excel should print a cell if it contains a formula with an error. You can choose to print the error that’s shown (the standard option), or replace the error with a blank value, two dashes (--), or the error code #N/A (meaning not available). You’ll learn much more about formulas in Chapter 8. • Page order sets the way Excel handles a large worksheet that’s too wide and too long for the printed page’s boundaries. When you choose “Down, then over” (the standard option), Excel starts by printing all the rows in the first batch of columns. Once it’s finished this batch, Excel then moves on to the next set of columns, and prints those columns for all the rows in your worksheet, and so on. When you chose “Over, then down,” Excel moves across your worksheet first. That means it prints all the columns in the first set of rows. After it’s printed these pages, it moves to the next set of rows, and so on. 10. Now that all your configuration is complete, click the Print button to send the spreadsheet to the printer. Excel prints your document using the settings you’ve selected. If you’re printing a very large worksheet, Excel shows a Printing dialog box for a few seconds as it sends the pages to the printer. If you decide to cancel the printing process—and you’re quick enough—you can click the Cancel button in this Printing dialog box to stop the operation. If you don’t possess the cat-like reflexes you once did, you can also open your printer queue to cancel the process. Look for your printer icon in the notification area at the bottom-right of your screen, and double-click that icon to open a print window. Select the offending print job in the list, and then press Delete (or choose Document➝Cancel from the print window’s menu). Some printers also provide their own cancel button that lets you stop a print job even after it’s left your computer.

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Figure 7-13: In this example, Excel uses the “Print titles” section to ensure that every page in this printout will display the first row of the spreadsheet as well as the first column.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Printing Parts of a Spreadsheet When working with large worksheets, you’ll often want to print only a small portion of your total data. Excel gives you several ways to limit your printout. You can hide the rows or columns you aren’t interested in, or you can select the cells you want to print, and, in the Print dialog box’s “Print what” box, choose Selection. But if you frequently need to print the same area, you’re better off defining and using a print area. A print area designates a portion of your worksheet as the only region that Excel will print. (The one exception is if you choose Selection from the “Print what” box, in which case Excel prints the selected cells, not the print area.) Once you

define a print area, Excel retains it until you remove it. That means you can make changes, save, close, and open your spreadsheet, and the same print area remains in place. To set a print area, select the rows, columns, or group of cells, and then choose Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Print Area➝Set Print Area. The portion of the worksheet that you’ve highlighted now has a thin dashed outline, indicating that this is the only region Excel will print. You can only have one print area at a time, and setting a new one always clears the previous one. To remove your print area so that you can print the entire worksheet, choose Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Print Area➝Clear Print Area.

Page Layout View: A Better Print Preview When you’re preparing to print that 142-page company budget monstrosity, there’s no reason to go in blind. Instead, prudent Excel fans use Page Layout view to check out what their printouts look like before they appear on paper.

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Page Layout view is a bit like the print preview that you saw backstage (Figure 7-11), but it’s more powerful. First, it’s bigger and easier to navigate. More importantly, it lets you do a few things that aren’t possible in backstage view, like setting headers and footers, editing cell values, and tweaking other page layout settings from the ribbon. To see the Page Layout view for a worksheet, choose View➝Workbook Views➝Page Layout View. Or, for an even quicker alternative, use the tiny Page Layout View button in the Status bar, which appears immediately to the left of the zoom slider. Either way, you see a nicely formatted preview (Figure 7-14). Figure 7-14: The Page Layout view shows the first (and part of the second) page of this worksheet’s 76 printed pages. This worksheet has 19 columns, but since they’re wider than the width of a single printed page, the first page includes only the leftmost seven columns, as shown here. You can scroll to the right to see the additional columns that’ll turn up on other pages, or scroll down to see more rows.

How does Page Layout view differ from Normal view? For starters, Page Layout view: • Paginates your data. You see exactly what fits on each page, and how many pages your printout requires. • Reveals any headers and footers you’ve set as part of the page setup. These details don’t appear in the Normal worksheet view. • Shows the margins that Excel will use for your pages. • Doesn’t show anything that Excel won’t print (like the letters at the top of each column). The only exception is the cell gridlines, which are shown to help you move around your worksheet. • Includes a bit of text in the Status bar that tells you where you are, page-wise, in a large spreadsheet. For example, you might see the text “Page: 5 of 26.”

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Note: Don’t confuse Page Layout view with an ordinary print preview (like the one you see when you choose File➝Print). A print preview provides a fixed “snapshot” of your printout. You can look, but you can’t touch. Page Layout view is vastly better because it shows what your printout will look like and it lets you edit data, change margins, set headers and footers, create charts, draw pictures—you get the idea. In fact, you can do everything you do in Normal view mode in Page Layout view. The only difference is you can’t squeeze quite as much data into the view at once.

If you aren’t particularly concerned with your margin settings, you can hide your margins in Page Layout view so you can fit more information into the Excel window. Figure 7-15 shows you how. Figure 7-15: Move your mouse between the pages and your mouse pointer changes into this strange two-arrow beast. You can then click to hide the margins in between pages (as shown here), and click again to show them (as shown in Figure 7-14). Either way, you see an exact replica of your printout. The only difference is whether you see the empty margin space.

Here are some of the tasks you may want to perform in Page Layout view: • To tweak print settings and see the effect, choose the Page Layout tab in the ribbon. The most important print-related sections are Page Setup (which lets you change orientation and margin settings), Scale to Fit (which lets you cram more information into your printed pages), and Sheet Options (which lets you control whether gridlines and column headers appear on the printout). • To move from page to page, you can use the scroll bar at the side of the window, or you can use the keyboard (like Page Up, Page Down, and the arrow keys). When you reach the edge of your data, you see shaded pages with the text “Click to add data” superimposed. If you want to add information further down the worksheet, just click one of these pages, and then start typing. • To adjust the page margins, first make sure the ruler is visible by turning on the View➝Show➝Ruler checkbox. Then, drag one of the margin lines on the ruler, as shown in Figure 7-16. If you want to set page margins by typing in the exact margin width, use the Page Layout tab of the ribbon instead.

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Figure 7-16: The Page Layout view lets you set margins by dragging the margin edge with your mouse. Here, the left margin (circled) is about to be narrowed down to 0.58 inches. If you’re also using a header or footer (below), make sure you don’t drag the page margin above the header or below the footer. If you do, then your header or footer will overlap your worksheet’s data.

When you’re ready to return to the Normal worksheet view, choose View➝Workbook Views➝Normal (or just click the Status bar’s tiny Normal View button).

Creating Headers and Footers A header is a bit of text that’s printed at the top of every page in your printout. A footer is a bit of text that’s printed at the bottom of every page. You can use one, both, or neither in a printout. Ordinarily, every new workbook starts out without a header or footer. However, Page Layout view gives you an easy way to add either one (or both). Just scroll up to the top of any page to create a header (or the bottom to create a footer), and then look for the box with the text “Click to add header” or “Click to add footer”. Click inside this box, and you can type the header or footer text you want. Note: You won’t see the header or footer boxes if you’ve drastically compressed your margins. That’s because the header and footer don’t fit. To get them back, resize the margins so that they’re larger. When you’re finished adding the header or footer, you can try adjusting the margins again to see just how small you can get them.

Of course, a good header or footer isn’t just an ordinary piece of text. Instead, it contains information that changes dynamically, like the file name, current page, or the date you printed it. You can get these pieces of information using specialized header and footer codes, which are distinguished by their use of square brackets. For example, if you enter the code [Page] into a footer, Excel replaces it with the current page number. If you use the code [Date], Excel substitutes the current date (when

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you fire off your printout). Of course, no one wants to memorize a long list of cryptic header and footer codes. To help you get these important details right, Excel adds a new tab to the ribbon named Header & Footer Tools | Design (Figure 7-17) when you edit a header or footer. The header area

Figure 7-17: The Header & Footer Tools | Design tab is chock-full of useful ingredients you can add to a header or footer. Click a button in the Header & Footer Elements section to insert a special Excel code that represents a dynamic value, like the number of pages (circled).

The quickest way to get a header or footer is to go to the Header & Footer Tools | Design➝Header & Footer section (shown in Figure 7-17), and then choose one of the Header or Footer list’s ready-made options. Some of the options you can use for a header or footer include: • Page numbering (for example, Page 1 or Page 1 of 10). • Worksheet name (for example, Sheet 1). • File name (for example, myfile.xlsx or C:\MyDocuments\myfile.xlsx). • The person who created the document, and the date it was created. • A combination of this information. Oddly enough, the header and footer options are the same. It’s up to you to decide whether you want page numbering at the bottom and a title at the top, or vice versa. If none of the standard options match what you need, you can edit the automatic header or footer, or you can create your own from scratch. Start typing in the header or footer box, and use the buttons in the Header & Footer Elements section to paste in the code you need for a dynamic value. And if you want to get more creative, chapter 7: viewing and printing worksheets

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switch to the Home tab of the ribbon, and then use the formatting buttons to change the font, size, alignment, and color of your header or footer. Finally, Excel gives you a few high-powered options in the Header & Footer Tools | Design➝Options section. These include: • Different First Page. This option lets you create one header and footer for the first page, and use a different pair for all subsequent pages. Once you’ve checked this option, fill in the first page header and footer on the first page, and then head to the second page to create a new header and footer that Excel can use for all subsequent pages. • Different Odd & Even pages. This option lets you create two different headers (and footers)—one for all even-numbered pages and one for all odd-numbered pages. (If you’re printing a bunch of double-sided pages, you can use this option to make sure the page number appears in the correct corner.) Use the first page to fill in the odd-numbered header and footer, and then use the second page to fill in the even-numbered header and footer. • Scale with Document. If you select this option, then when you change the print scale to fit in more or less information on your printout (page 223), Excel adjusts the headers and footers proportionately. • Align with Page Margins. If you select this option, Excel moves the header and footer so that they’re centered in relation to the margins. If you don’t select this option, Excel centers them in relation to the whole page. The only time you’ll notice a difference is if your left and right margins are significantly different sizes. All these settings affect both headers and footers.

Controlling Pagination Sooner or later it will happen to you—you’ll face an intimidatingly large worksheet that, when printed, is hacked into dozens of apparently unconnected pages. You could spend a lot of time assembling this jigsaw printout (using a bulletin board and lots of tape), or you could take control of the printing process and tell Excel exactly where to split your data into pages. In the following sections, you’ll learn several techniques to do just that.

Page Breaks One of Excel’s often overlooked but surprisingly handy features is manual page breaks. The idea is that you tell Excel explicitly where to start a new page. For example, you can tell Excel to start a new page between subsequent tables on a worksheet (rather than print a page that has the end of the first one and the beginning of the next).

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To insert a page break, move to the leftmost column (column A), and then scroll down to the first cell that you want to appear on the new page. Then, choose Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Breaks➝Insert Page Break. You see a dotted line that indicates the dividing lines in between pages (Figure 7-18).

Manually added page break

Natural page break

Figure 7-18: Using a page break, you can make sure the second table (2010 Purchases) always begins on a new page. The dotted line shows where one page ends and the new page starts. When you add a page break, you see a dotted line for it, and you see a dotted line that shows you where additional page breaks naturally fall, based on your margins, page orientation, and paper size settings.

Note: There’s no limit to how many page breaks you can add to a worksheet—if you have a dozen tables that appear one after the other, you can place a page break after each one to make sure they all start on a new page.

You can also insert page breaks to split your worksheet vertically into pages. This is useful if your worksheet is too wide to fit on one page, but you want to control exactly where the page break will fall. To do so, move to the first row, scroll to the column where the new page should begin, and then choose Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Breaks➝Insert Page Break. You can remove page breaks one at a time by moving to an adjacent cell and choosing Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Breaks➝Remove Page Break. Or you can clear them all using Page Layout➝Page Setup➝Breaks➝Reset All Page Breaks.

Scaling Page breaks are a nifty feature for making sure you paginate your printouts just the way you want them. However, they can’t help you fit more information on a page. They simply let you place page breaks earlier than they would ordinarily appear, so they fall in a more appropriate place.

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If you want to fit more on a page, you need to shrink your information down to a smaller size. Excel includes a scaling feature that lets you take this step easily without forcing you to reformat your worksheet. Scaling lets you fit more rows and columns on a page, by shrinking everything proportionally. For example, if you reduce scaling to 50 percent, you fit twice as many columns and rows on a page. Conversely, you can use scaling to enlarge your data. To change the scaling percentage, just type a new percentage into the Page Layout➝Scale to Fit➝Scale box. The data still appears just as big on your worksheet, but Excel shrinks or expands it in the printout. To gauge the effect, you can use the Page Layout view (page 217) to preview your printout. Rather than fiddling with the scaling percentage (and then seeing what its effect is on your worksheet by trial and error), you may want to force your data to fit into a fixed number of pages. To do this, you set the values in the Page Layout➝Scale to Fit➝Width box and the Page Layout➝Scale to Fit➝Height box. Excel performs a few behind-the-scenes calculations and adjusts the scaling percentage accordingly. For example, if you choose one page tall and one page wide, then Excel shrinks your entire worksheet so that everything fits into one page. This scaling is tricky to get right (and can lead to hopelessly small text), so make sure you review your worksheet in the Page Layout view before you print it. Tip: Page Break Preview mode, described next, gives you yet another way to squeeze more data onto a single page.

Page Break Preview: A Bird’s-Eye View of Your Worksheet You don’t must be a tree-hugging environmentalist to want to minimize the number of pages you print out. Enter the Page Break Preview, which gives you a bird’s-eye view of how an entire worksheet’s going to print. Page Break Preview is particularly useful if your worksheet has lots of columns. That’s because Page Break Preview zooms out so you can see a large amount of data at once, and it uses thick blue dashed lines to show you where page breaks will happen, as shown in Figure 7-19. In addition, the Page Break Preview numbers every page, placing the label “Page X” (where “X” is the page number) in large gray lettering in the middle of each page. To preview the page breaks in your data, select View➝Workbook Views➝Page Break Preview, or use the tiny Page Break Preview button in the Status bar. A window appears, informing you that you can use Page Break Preview mode to move page breaks. You can choose whether you want to see this message again; if not, turn on the “Do not show this dialog again” checkbox before clicking OK.

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Figure 7-19: This example shows a large worksheet in Page Break Preview mode. The worksheet is too wide to fit on one page (at least in portrait orientation), and the thick dotted line clearly indicates that the page breaks after column G and after row 47. (Excel never breaks a printout in the middle of a column or row.)

Once you’re in Page Break Preview mode, you can do all of the things you do in Normal view mode, including editing data, formatting cells, and changing the zoom percentage to reveal more or fewer pages. You can also click the blue dashed lines that represent page breaks, and drag them to include more or less rows and columns in your page. Excel lets you make two types of changes using page breaks: • You can make less data fit onto a page. To do so, drag the bottom page break up or the right-side page break to the left. Usually, you’ll perform these steps if you notice that a page break is in an awkward place, like just before a row with some kind of summary or subtotal. • You can make more data fit onto a page. To do so, drag the bottom page break down or the right-side page break to the right.

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Of course, everyone wants to fit more information onto their printouts, but there’s only so much space on the page. So what does Excel do when you expand a page by dragging the page break? It simply adjusts the scaling setting you learned about earlier (page 223). The larger you make the page, the smaller the Scaling percentage setting becomes. That means your printed text may end up too tiny for you to read. (The text on your computer’s display doesn’t change, however, so you don’t have any indication of just how small your text has become until you print out your data, or take a look at it in Page Layout view.) Note: Scaling affects all the pages in your printout. That means when you drag one page break to expand a page, you actually end up compressing all the pages in your workbook. However, the page breaks don’t change for other pages, which means you may end up with empty, unused space on some of the pages. The best advice: If your goal is merely to fit more information into an entire printout, change the scaling percentage manually instead of using the Page Break Preview. On the other hand, if you need to squeeze just a little bit more data onto a specific page, use the Page Break Preview.

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Building Basic Formulas

M

ost Excel fans don’t turn to the world’s leading spreadsheet software just to create nicely formatted tables. Instead, they rely on Excel’s industrialstrength computing muscle, which lets you reduce reams of numbers to neat subtotals and averages. Performing these calculations is the first step to extracting meaningful information out of raw data. Excel provides a number of different ways to build formulas, letting you craft them by hand or point-and-click them into existence. In this chapter, you’ll learn about all of these techniques. You’ll start by examining the basic ingredients that make up any formula, and then take a close look at the rules Excel uses when evaluating a formula.

Creating a Basic Formula First things first: what exactly do formulas do in Excel? A formula is a series of instructions that you place in a cell in order to perform some kind of calculation. These instructions may be as simple as telling Excel to sum up a column of numbers, or they may incorporate advanced statistical functions to spot trends and make predictions. But in all cases, all formulas share the same basic characteristics: • You enter each formula into a single cell. • Excel calculates the result of a formula every time you open a spreadsheet or change the data a formula uses. • Formula results are usually numbers, although you can create formulas that have text or Boolean (true or false) results.

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• To view any formula (for example, to gain some insight into how Excel produced a displayed result), you must move to the cell containing the formula, and then look in the formula bar (see Figure 8-1). The formula bar also doubles as a handy tool for editing your formulas. • Formulas can evaluate a combination of numbers you input (useful when you want to use Excel as a handy calculator) or, more powerfully, the contents of other cells. Formulas can even process an entire group of cells when using certain functions. One of the simplest formulas you can create is this one: =1+1

The equal sign is how you tell Excel that you’re entering a formula (as opposed to a string of text or numbers). The formula that follows is what you want Excel to calculate. Note that the formula doesn’t include the result. When creating a formula in Excel, you write the question, and then Excel coughs up the answer, as shown in Figure 8-1. Figure 8-1: Top: This simple formula begins its life when you enter it into a cell. The checkmark and X buttons to the left of the formula bar let you quickly complete or cancel, respectively, your formula. Bottom: Or you can press Enter, and Excel displays the result in the cell. The formula bar always displays the complete formula (=1+1). In formula lingo, this particular example consists of two literal values (1 and 1) and one arithmetic operator (+).

All formulas use some combination of the following ingredients: • The equal sign (=). Every formula must begin with the equal sign. It signals to Excel that the cell contains a formula, not just ordinary text.

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• The simple operators. These ingredients include everything you fondly remember from high-school math class, including addition (+), subtraction (−), multiplication (*), division (/), and exponentiation (^). Table 8-1 lists these ingredients, also known as arithmetic operators. • Numbers. These ingredients are known as constants or literal values, because they never change (unless you edit the formula). • Cell references. These references point to another cell, or a range of cells, that you need data from in order to perform a calculation. For example, say you have a list of 10 numbers. A formula in the cell beneath this list may refer to all 10 of the cells above it in order to calculate their average. • Functions. Functions are specialized formulas built into Excel that let you perform a wide range of calculations. For example, Excel provides dedicated functions that calculate sums and averages, standard deviations, yields, cosines and tangents, and much more. The next four chapters describe these functions, which span every field from financial accounting to trigonometry. • Spaces. Excel ignores these. However, you can use them to make a formula easier to read. For example, you can write the formula =3*5 + 6*2 instead of =3*5+6*2. (The only exception to this rule applies to cell ranges, where spaces have a special meaning. You’ll see this described on page 237.) Table 8-1. Excel’s arithmetic operators

Operator

Name

Example

Result

+

Addition

=1+1

2

−

Subtraction

=1−1

0

*

Multiplication

=2*2

4

/

Division

=4/2

2

^

Exponentiation

=2^3

8

%

Percent

=20%

0.20

Note: The percentage (%) operator divides a number by 100.

Excel’s Order of Operations For computer programs and human beings alike, one of the basic challenges when it comes to reading and calculating formula results is figuring out the order of operations—mathematician-speak for deciding which calculations to perform first when there’s more than one calculation in a formula. For example, given the formula: =10 - 8 * 7

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the result, depending on your order of operations, is either 14 or –46. Fortunately, Excel abides by the standard rules for order of operations, meaning it doesn’t necessarily process your formulas from left to right. Instead, it evaluates complex formulas piece-by-piece in this order: 1. Parentheses (any calculations within parentheses are always performed first) 2. Percent 3. Exponents 4. Division and Multiplication 5. Addition and Subtraction Note: When Excel encounters formulas that contain operators of equal precedence (that is, the same order of operation priority level), it evaluates these operators from left to right. However, in basic mathematical formulas, this has no effect on the result.

For example, consider the following formula: =5 + 2 * 2 ^ 3 - 1

To arrive at the answer of 20, Excel first performs the exponentiation (2 to the power of 3): =5 + 2 * 8 - 1

And then the multiplication: =5 + 16 - 1

And then the addition and subtraction: =20

To control this order, you can add parentheses. For example, notice how adding parentheses affects the result in the following formulas: 5 + 2 * 2 ^ (5 + 2) * 2 (5 + 2) * 2 5 + (2 * (2

(3 - 1) = ^ 3 - 1 = ^ (3 - 1) ^ 3)) - 1

13 55 = 28 = 20

You must always use parentheses in pairs (one open parenthesis for every closing parenthesis). If you don’t, then Excel gets confused and lets you know you need to fix things, as shown in Figure 8-2. Tip: Remember, when you’re working with a lengthy formula, you can expand the formula bar to see several lines at a time. To do so, click the down arrow at the far right of the formula bar (to make it three lines tall), or drag the bottom edge of the formula bar to make it as many lines large as you’d like. Page 32 shows an example.

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Figure 8-2: Top: If you create a formula with a mismatched number of opening and closing parentheses (like this one), Excel won’t accept it. Bottom: Excel offers to correct the formula by adding the missing parentheses at the end. You may not want this addition, though. If not, cancel the suggestion, and then edit your formula by hand. Excel helps a bit by highlighting matched sets of parentheses. For example, as you move to the opening parenthesis, Excel automatically bolds both the opening and closing parentheses in the formula bar.

Cell References Excel’s formulas are handy when you want to perform a quick calculation. But if you want to take full advantage of Excel’s power, then you’re going to want to use formulas to perform calculations on the information that’s already in your worksheet. To do that you need to use cell references—Excel’s way of pointing to one or more cells in a worksheet. For example, say you want to calculate the cost of your Amazonian adventure holiday, based on information like the number of days your trip will last, the price of food and lodging, and the cost of vaccination shots at a travel clinic. If you use cell references, you can enter all this information into different cells, and then write a formula that calculates a grand total. This approach buys you unlimited flexibility because you can change the cell data whenever you want (for example, turning your three-day getaway into a month-long odyssey), and Excel automatically refreshes the formula results.

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Cell references are a great way to save a ton of time. They come in handy when you want to create a formula that involves a bunch of widely scattered cells whose values frequently change. For example, rather than manually adding up a bunch of subtotals to create a grand total, you can create a grand total formula that uses cell references to point to a handful of subtotal cells. They also let you refer to large groups of cells by specifying a range. For example, using the cell reference lingo you’ll learn on page 237, you can specify all the cells in the first column between the second and 100th rows. Every cell reference points to another cell. For example, if you want a reference that points to cell A1 (the cell in column A, row 1), then use this cell reference: =A1

In Excel-speak, this reference translates to “get the value from cell A1, and insert it in the current cell.” So if you put this formula in cell B1, then it displays whatever value’s currently in cell A1. In other words, these two cells are now linked. Cell references work within formulas just as regular numbers do. For example, the following formula calculates the sum of two cells, A1 and A2: =A1+A2

Note: In Excel lingo, A1 and A2 are precedents, which means another cell needs them to perform a calculation. Cell B1, which contains the formula, is called the dependent, because it depends on A1 and A2 to do its work. These terms become important when you need to hunt for errors in a complex calculation using Excel’s error-checking tools (page 392).

Provided both cells contain numbers, you’ll see the total appear in the cell that contains the formula. If one of the cells contains text, then you’ll see an error code instead that starts with a # symbol. Errors are described in more detail on page 242. Note: This chapter focuses on how to perform calculations using cells that contain ordinary numbers. Excel also lets you manipulate other types of content in a formula, like text and dates. You’ll learn more about these topics in Chapter 11.

How Excel Formats Cells That Contain Cell References As you learned in Chapter 5, the way you format a cell affects how Excel displays the cell’s value. When you create a formula that references other cells, Excel attempts to simplify your life by applying automatic formatting. It reads the number format that the source cells (that is, the cells being referred to) use, and applies that to the cell with the formula. If you add two numbers and you’ve formatted both with the Currency number format, then your result also has the Currency number format. Of course, you’re always free to change the formatting of the cell after you’ve entered the formula.

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GEM IN THE ROUGH

Excel As a Pocket Calculator Sometimes you need to calculate a value before you enter it into your worksheet. Before you reach for your pocket calculator, you may like to know that Excel lets you enter a formula in a cell, and then use the result in that same cell. This way, the formula disappears and you’re left with the result of the calculated value. Start by typing your formula into the cell (for example =65*88). Next, press F9 to perform the calculation. Finally, just hit Enter to insert this value into the cell. Remember, when you use this technique, you replace your formula with the calculated value. If your calculation is based on the values of other cells, then Excel won’t update

the result if you change those other cells’ values. That’s the difference between a cell that has a value, and a cell that has a formula. Excel has a similar trick that’s helpful if you want to take a whole batch of formulas (in different cells), and replace them all with values. It’s the Paste Values command. To try it out, select the cells that have the formulas you want to change, copy them (Home➝Clipboard➝Copy), and then paste them somewhere in your worksheet using the Home➝Clipboard➝Paste➝Paste Values command. The pasted cells now have the numbers, not the formulas.

Usually, Excel’s automatic formatting is quite handy. Like all automatic features, however, it’s a little annoying if you don’t understand how it works when it springs into action. Here are a few points to consider: • Excel copies only the number format to the formula cell. It ignores other details, like fonts, fill colors, alignment, and so on. (Of course, you can manually copy formats using the Format Painter, as discussed on page 173.) • If your formula uses more than one cell reference, and the different cells use different number formats, Excel uses its own rules of precedence to decide which number format to use. For example, if you add a cell that uses the Currency number format with one that uses the Scientific number format, then the destination cell has the Scientific number format. Sadly, these rules aren’t spelled out anywhere, so if you don’t see the result you want, it’s best to just set your own formatting. • If you change the formatting of the source cells after you enter the formula, it won’t have any effect on the formula cell. • Excel copies source cell formatting only if the cell that contains the formula uses the General number format (which is the format that all cells begin with). If you apply another number format to the cell before you enter the formula, then Excel doesn’t copy any formatting from the source cells. Similarly, if you change a formula to refer to new source cells, then Excel doesn’t copy the format information from the new source cells.

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Functions

Functions A good deal of Excel’s popularity is due to the collection of functions it provides. Functions are built-in, specialized algorithms that you can incorporate into your own formulas to perform powerful calculations. Functions work like miniature computer programs—you supply the data, and the function performs a calculation and gives you the result. In some cases, functions just simplify calculations that you could probably perform on your own. For example, most people know how to calculate the average of several values, but when you’re feeling a bit lazy, Excel’s built-in AVERAGE() function automatically gives you the average of any cell range. Even more usefully, Excel functions perform feats that you probably wouldn’t have a hope of coding on your own, including complex mathematical and statistical calculations that predict trends—hidden relationships in your data that you can use to make guesses or predict the future. Tip: You can create your own Excel functions by writing a series of instructions using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code. Chapter 29 shows you how.

Every function provides a slightly different service. For example, one of Excel’s statistical functions is named COMBIN(). It’s a specialized tool used by probability mathematicians to calculate the number of ways a set of items can be combined. Although this sounds technical, even ordinary folks can use COMBIN() to get some interesting information. You can use the COMBIN() function, for example, to count the number of possible combinations there are in certain games of chance. The following formula uses COMBIN() to calculate how many different five-card combinations there are in a standard deck of 52 playing cards: =COMBIN(52,5)

Functions are always written in all capitals. (More in a moment on what those numbers inside the parentheses are doing.) However, you don’t need to worry about the capitalization of function names, because Excel automatically capitalizes the function names that you type in.

Using a Function in a Formula Functions alone don’t actually do anything in Excel. Functions need to be part of a formula to produce a result. For example, COMBIN() is a function name. But it actually does something—that is, give you a result—only when you’ve inserted it into a formula, like so: =COMBIN(52,5). Whether you’re using the simplest or the most complicated function, the syntax—or, rules for including a function within a formula—is always similar. To use a function, start by entering the function name. Excel helps you out by showing a pop-up list with possible candidates as you type, as shown in Figure 8-3. This handy feature is called Formula AutoComplete. 234

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UP TO SPEED

Learning New Functions This book will introduce you to dozens of new functions. Sometimes you’ll start off by looking at a sample formula that uses the function, but for more complex functions, start by considering the function description. The function description assigns a name to each argument. You can learn about the type of data the function requires before you start wading into an example with real numbers. For example, here’s the function description for the COMBIN() function: COMBIN(number_in_set, number_chosen)

description doesn’t include the initial equal sign (=) that you need in all formulas. Sometimes a function takes an optional argument. The argument isn’t required, but it may be important depending on the behavior you want. Optional arguments are always shown in square brackets. (Excel uses the same convention in its help and formula tooltips.) You’ll see plenty of function descriptions in this book. You can look up function descriptions in Excel. Page 252 tells you where to look.

You can tell the difference between a sample formula and the function description by the fact that the function

Figure 8-3: After you type =COM, Excel helpfully points out that it knows only two functions that start that way: COMBIN() and COMPLEX(). If your fingers are getting tired, use the arrow keys to pick the right one out of the list, and then click Tab to pop it into your formula. (Or, you can just double-click it.)

After you type the function name, add a pair of parentheses. Then, inside the parentheses, put all the information the function needs to perform its calculations. In the case of the COMBIN() function, Excel needs two pieces of information, or arguments. The first is the number of items in the set (the 52-card deck), and the second’s the number of items you’re randomly selecting (in this case, 5). Most functions, like COMBIN(), require two or three arguments. However, some functions can accept many more, while a few don’t need any arguments at all. Once again, Formula AutoComplete guides you by telling you what arguments you need, as shown in Figure 8-4. Once you type this formula into a cell, the result (2598960) appears in your worksheet. In other words, there are 2,598,960 different possible five-card combinations in any deck of cards. Rather than having to calculate this fact using probability theory— or, heaven forbid, trying to count out the possibilities manually—the COMBIN() function handled it for you.

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Figure 8-4: When you type the opening parenthesis after a function name, Excel automatically displays a tooltip indicating what arguments the function requires. The argument you’re currently entering is bolded in the tooltip. The argument names aren’t crystal clear, but if you already know how the function works, they’re usually enough to jog your memory.

Note: Even if a function doesn’t take any arguments, you still need to supply an empty set of parentheses after the function name. One example is the RAND() function, which generates a random fractional number. The formula =RAND() works fine, but if you forget the parentheses and merely enter =RAND, then Excel displays an error message (#NAME?) that’s Excelian for: “Hey! You got the function’s name wrong.” See Table 8-2 for more information about Excel’s error messages.

UP TO SPEED

Understanding Functions Even though it’s relatively easy to understand the basics behind how functions work and how to combine them in a formula, that doesn’t mean you’ll understand what all functions do and why you should use a particular function. If you don’t already know a little probability theory, for instance, then the COMBIN() function may not be very useful. Excel’s packed full of advanced formulas like COMBIN() that are tailored for statisticians, accountants, and mathematicians. Most of these you’ll never need to use. In this book, functions that’ll likely be useful to a nonspecialist reader are explained completely. For example, you may not know the financial term net present value, but you’ll probably still be interested in using Excel’s NPV()

function to calculate the value of your investments. On the other hand, if you don’t know the meaning of a complex conjugate—an abstract concept used in some engineering calculations—you won’t be interested in the IMCONJUGATE() function. This book won’t explain the math behind these more specialized functions. (In fact, properly explaining some of these concepts would require at least a whole other book!) Instead, these functions will be briefly pointed out in a note or table in the relevant chapter. This way, you can easily find these functions if they’re relevant to your work and you already know the underlying math or statistical concepts that power them.

Using Cell References with a Function One of the particularly powerful things about functions is that they don’t necessarily need to use literal values in their arguments. They can also use cell references. For

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example, you could rewrite the five-card combination formula (mentioned earlier) so that it specifies the number of cards that’ll be drawn from the deck based on a number that you’ve typed in somewhere else in the spreadsheet. Assuming this information’s entered into cell B2, the formula would become: =COMBIN(52,B2)

Building on this formula, you can calculate the probability (albeit astronomically low) of getting the exact hand you want in one draw: =1/COMBIN(52,B2)

You could even multiply this number by 100 or use the Percent number style to see your percentage chance of getting the cards you want. Tip: Excel gives you a detailed function reference to find functions and learn about them. Excel’s information doesn’t make for light reading, though; for the most part, it’s in IRS-speak. You’ll learn more about using this reference on page 252.

Using Cell Ranges with a Function In many cases, you don’t want to refer to just a single cell, but rather a range of cells. A range is simply a grouping of multiple cells. These cells may be next to each other (say, a range that includes all the cells in a single column), or they could be scattered across your worksheet. Ranges are useful for computing averages, totals, and many other calculations. To group together a series of cells, use one of the three following reference operators: • The comma (,) separates more than one cell. For example, the series A1, B7, H9 is a cell range that contains three cells. The comma’s known as the union operator. You can add spaces before or after a comma, but Excel just ignores or removes them (depending on its mood). • The colon (:) separates the top-left and bottom-right corners of a block of cells. You’re telling Excel: “Hey, use this block of cells in my formula.” For example, A1:A5 is a range that includes cells A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5. The range A2:B3 is a grid that contains cells A2, A3, B2, and B3. The colon is the range operator—by far the most powerful way to select multiple cells. • The space can find cells that are common to two or more different cell ranges. For example, the expression A1:A3 A1:B10 is a range that consists of only three cells: A1, A2, and A3 (because those three cells are the only ones found in both ranges). The space is technically the intersection operator, and it’s not used terribly often. Tip: As you might expect, Excel lets you specify ranges by selecting cells with your mouse, instead of typing in the range manually. You’ll see this trick later in this chapter on page 245.

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You can’t enter ranges directly into formulas that just use the simple operators. For example, the formula =A1:B1+5 doesn’t work, because Excel doesn’t know what to do with the range A1:B1. (Should it sum up the range? Or average it? Excel has no way of knowing.) Instead, you need to use ranges with functions that know how to use them. For instance, one of Excel’s most basic functions is named SUM(); it calculates the total for a group of cells. To use the SUM() function, you enter its name, an open parenthesis, the cell range you want to add up, and then a closing parenthesis. Here’s how you can use the SUM() function to add together three cells, A1, A2, and A3: =SUM(A1,A2,A3)

And here’s a more compact syntax that performs the same calculation using the range operator: =SUM(A1:A3)

A similar SUM() calculation’s shown in Figure 8-5. Clearly, if you want to total a column with hundreds of values, it’s far easier to specify the first and last cell using the range operator rather than including each cell reference in your formula!

Figure 8-5: Using a cell range as the argument in the SUM() function is a quick way to add up a series of numbers in a column. Note that when you enter or edit a formula, Excel highlights all the cells that formula uses with different colored borders. In this example, you see the range of cells C2, C3, and C4 in a blue box.

Sometimes your worksheet may have a list with unlimited growth potential, like a list of expenses or a catalog of products. In this case, you can code your formulas to include an entire column by leaving out the row number. For example, the range A:A includes all the cells in column A (and, similarly, the range 2:2 includes all the cells in row 2). The range A:A also includes any heading cells, which isn’t a problem for the SUM() function (because it ignores text cells), but could cause problems for other functions. If you don’t want to include the top cell, then you need to think carefully about what you want to do. You could create a normal range that stretches from the second cell to the last cell using the mind-blowingly big range A2:A1048576. However, this could cause a problem with older versions of Excel, which don’t support as many rows. You’re better off creating a table (described in Chapter 14). Tables expand automatically, updating any linked formulas.

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Excel Compatibility Functions Some of Excel’s functions use extraordinarily complex logic behind the scenes. Over the years, Excel experts have found minor flaws and quirks in some functions, like cases where the functions deviate from mathematical standards. Correcting these problems is a bit messy. If different versions of Excel use subtly different calculation logic, you could find that your numbers change unpredictably— for example, when you upgrade your software or when you pass your spreadsheet to a colleague with a different version of Excel. In this case, consistency is more important than absolute, theoretical accuracy. To avoid this sort of situation, the designers of Excel rarely change an existing function. Instead, in Excel 2010 they’ve added new functions that have similar names but incorporate a period. For example, in Excel 2010 the RANK.AVG() and RANK.EQ() functions replace the old-school RANK() function. Although RANK() still works, Microsoft recommends you use one of its replacements in new worksheets. (If you’re curious, the replacements change how Excel ranks tied values, as you’ll learn on page 273.) Because RANK() is kicking around only to ensure that old worksheets keep working, it’s called a compatibility function. So how do you recognize compatibility functions, to make sure you don’t accidentally use one when you actually want the more modern replacement? The trick is to read the function tooltip, which clearly identifies compatibility functions, as shown in Figure 8-6.

Figure 8-6: The RANK() function is included for compatibility with old worksheets. Compatibility functions always appear at the bottom of the Formula AutoComplete list, and they’re further distinguished by an icon with a yellow exclamation mark.

Unfortunately, the case for ditching compatibility functions isn’t as clear-cut as it seems. The problem is that the new functions won’t work in older versions of Excel. For example, imagine you use a function like RANK.EQ() and send your spreadsheet to a colleague who’s using Excel 2007. Because Excel doesn’t know anything about this function, it can’t evaluate the formula. Instead, it shows the infamous #NAME? error (page 242) in the cell.

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So the bottom line is this: For now, it’s safer to keep using compatibility functions instead of their newer replacements. But if a replacement has the behavior you really want, and you don’t expect to share your work with other people, you can use the new functions. Note: Almost all of the functions you’ll learn about in the following chapters are traditional functions that have been with Excel for generations. You’ll get a clear warning when we discuss new Excel 2010 functions (those with a period in their names), so you don’t use them unknowingly. And if you’re still paranoid, you can use the Compatibility Checker (page 41) to scan your worksheet for potential issues, including new functions that won’t work in old versions of Excel.

Formula Errors If you make a syntax mistake when entering a formula (like leaving out a function argument or including a mismatched number of parentheses), Excel lets you know right away. Moreover, like a stubborn schoolteacher, Excel won’t accept the formula until you’ve corrected it. It’s also possible, though, to write a perfectly legitimate formula that doesn’t return a valid answer. Here’s an example: =A1/A2

If both A1 and A2 have numbers, this formula works without a hitch. However, if you leave A2 blank, or if you enter text instead of numbers, then Excel can’t evaluate the formula, and it reminds you with an error message. Excel lets you know about formula errors by using an error code that begins with the number sign (#) and ends with an exclamation point (!), as shown in Figure 8-7. In order to remove this error, you need to track down the problem and resolve it, which may mean correcting the formula or changing the cells it references. When you click the exclamation mark icon next to an error, you see a menu of choices (as shown in Figure 8-7): • Help On This Error pops open Excel’s online help, with a (sometimes cryptic) description of the problem and what could have caused it. • Show Calculation Steps pops open the Evaluate Formula dialog box, where you can work your way through a complex formula one step at a time. Page 388 describes how this advanced feature works. • Ignore Error tells Excel to stop bothering you about this problem, in any worksheet you create. You won’t see the green triangle for this error again (although you’ll still see the error code in the cell). • Edit in Formula Bar brings you to the formula bar, where you can change the formula to fix a mistake.

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Figure 8-7: When Excel spots an error, it inserts a tiny green triangle into the cell’s top-left corner. When you move to the offending cell, Excel displays an exclamation mark icon next to it (a smart tag). Hover over the exclamation mark to view a description of the error (which appears in a tooltip), or click the exclamation icon to see a list of menu options.

• Error Checking Options opens up the Excel Options dialog box, and brings you to the section where you can configure the settings Excel uses for alerting you about errors. You can turn off background error checking, or change the color of the tiny error triangles using the settings under the Error Checking heading. (Background error checking is the feature that flags cells with tiny green triangles when the cells contain a problem.) You can also tell Excel to start paying attention to errors you previously told it ignore by clicking the Reset Ignored Errors button. Underneath that button is a section named “Error checking rules” that has a number of options that focus on specific types of errors. For example, you can choose to have Excel ignore numbers stored as text, formulas that ignore part of a range, and other situations that technically aren’t errors, but usually indicate that you’ve done something you didn’t mean to. Excel always reports genuine errors, like #VALUE! and #NAME? regardless of what choices you make in this dialog box. Note: Sometimes a problem isn’t an error, but simply the result of data that hasn’t yet been entered. In this case, you can solve the problem by using a conditional error-trapping formula. This conditional formula checks whether the data’s present, and it performs the calculation only if it is. The next section shows one way to use an error-trapping formula.

Table 8-2 lists the error codes that Excel uses.

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Table 8-2. Excel’s error codes

Error code

Description

#VALUE!

You used the wrong type of data. Maybe your function expects a single value and you submitted a whole range. Or, more commonly, you might have used a function or created a simple arithmetic formula with a cell that contains text instead of numbers.

#NAME?

Excel can’t find the name of the function you used. This error code usually means you misspelled a function’s name, although it can indicate you used text without quotation marks or left out the empty parentheses after the function name. (You’ll see how you can use text in a formula in Chapter 11.) This error will also happen if you try to use a new Excel 2010 function in older version of Excel.

#NUM!

There’s a problem with one of the numbers you’re using. For example, this error code appears when a calculation produces a number that’s too large or too small for Excel to deal with.

#DIV/0

You tried to divide by zero. This error code also appears if you try to divide by a cell that’s blank, because Excel treats a blank cell as though it contains the number 0 for the purpose of simple calculations with the arithmetic operators. (Some functions, like AVERAGE(), are a little more intelligent and ignore blank cells.)

#REF!

Your cell reference is invalid. This error most often happens if you delete or paste over the cells you were using, or if you try to copy a cell from one worksheet to another. (For information about creating formulas that span worksheets and workbooks, refer to Chapter 13.)

#N/A

The value isn’t available. This error can happen if you try to perform certain types of lookup or statistical functions that work with cell ranges. For example, if you use a function to search a range and it can’t find what you need, you may get this result. (You’ll learn about lookup functions in Chapter 12.) Sometimes people enter a #N/A value manually in order to tell Excel to ignore a particular cell when creating charts and graphs. The easiest way to do this is to use the NA() function (rather than entering the text #N/A).

#NULL!

You used the intersection operator incorrectly. Remember, the intersection operator finds cells that two ranges share in common. This error results if there are no cells in common. Oftentimes, people use the intersection operator by accident, as the operator’s just a single space character.

########

This code isn’t actually an error condition—in all likelihood, Excel has successfully calculated your formula. However, the formula can’t be displayed in the cell using the current number format. To solve this problem, you can widen the column, or possibly change the number format (page 141) if you require a certain number of fixed decimal places.

Tip: Chapter 13 describes a collection of Excel tools designed to help you track down the source of an error in a complex formula—especially one where the problem isn’t immediately obvious.

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TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

Circular References One of the more aggravating problems that can happen with formulas is the infamous circular reference. A circular reference happens when you create a formula that depends, indirectly or directly, on its own value. For example, consider what happens if you enter the following formula in cell B1. =B1+10

In order for this formula to work, Excel would need to take the current B1 value, and add 10. However, this operation changes the value of B1, which means Excel needs to recalculate the formula. If unchecked, this process would continue in an endless loop without ever producing a value. More subtle forms of circular references are possible. For example, you can create a formula in one cell that refers to a cell in another cell that refers back to the original cell. This is what’s known as an indirect circular reference, but the problem is the same.

Ordinarily, Excel doesn’t allow circular references. When you enter a formula that contains a circular reference, Excel displays an error message and forces you to edit the formula until you’ve removed the circular reference. However, you can configure Excel to allow circular references by modifying the calculation settings, as described in the Formulas section of the Excel Options dialog box. In this case, Excel repeats the loop a fixed number of times, or until the value seems to settle down and stop changing. Occasionally, this technique is useful for calculating certain types of approximations in advanced formulas. In most cases, though, this approach is rather dangerous because it means you don’t catch accidental circular references, which can lead to invalid data. A better approach is to write a custom function that performs a calculation in a loop using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), as described in Chapter 28.

Logical Operators So far, you’ve seen the basic arithmetic operators (which are used for addition, subtraction, division, and so on) and the cell reference operators (used to specify one or more cells). There’s one final category of operators that’s useful when creating formulas: logical operators. Logical operators let you build conditions into your formulas so the formulas produce different values depending on the value of the data they encounter. You can use a condition with cell references or literal values. For example, the condition A2=A4 is true if cell A2 contains the same value as cell A4. On the other hand, if these cells contain different values (say 2 and 3), then the formula generates a false value. Using conditions is a stepping-stone to using conditional logic. Conditional logic lets you perform different calculations based on different scenarios. For example, you can use conditional logic to see how large an order is, and provide a discount if the total order cost’s over $5,000. Excel evaluates the condition, meaning it determines if the condition’s true or false. You can then tell Excel what to do, based on that evaluation. Table 8-3 lists all the logical operators you can use to build formulas.

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Table 8-3. Logical operators

Operator

Name

Example

Result

=

Equal to

1=2

FALSE

>

Greater than

1>2

FALSE


=1

TRUE

2006), A20*5%, A20*3%)

Similarly, you may encounter a situation where you want to alter your logic so that the higher commission rate kicks in if at least one of two different criteria is met. In this case, you’d use the OR() function. Tip: The information functions described in Chapter 12 are also quite useful in conditional statements. The “IS” functions, like ISERROR() and ISBLANK(), especially lend themselves to these statements.

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You can also choose between more than two options by nesting multiple IF() statements in a single formula. (Nesting is a technique that lets you put one function inside another.) The following formula uses a commission of 2 percent if the sale is under $500, a commission of five percent if the total is above $10,000, and a 3 percent commission for all other cases. =IF(A2010000, A20*5%, A20*3%))

The formula begins by checking the first condition (whether A20 is less than $500). If the condition is met, then Excel carries out the first expression, A20*2%. If A20 is not less than $500, Excel moves on to the second expression, which is actually another IF() function. It then checks the second condition and chooses between the two remaining commission levels. Excel allows up to a staggering 64 nested IF() statements in one formula. (This limitation actually applies to all Excel functions. You can’t nest functions more than 64 levels deep.) However, it’s unlikely that anyone could actually understand a formula with 64 IF() statements. Nesting IF() statements may get the job done, but it can lead to some extremely complicated formulas, so tread carefully. Note: In some situations, nesting multiple IF() statements may cause the formula to become too complex and error-prone. In these cases, you may want to consider simplifying your logic by breaking it into several linked formulas, or building a custom function using full-fledged VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code. You’ll see an example of that in Chapter 29.

Along with the functions in the Logical category, Excel also includes a few more functions that use conditions. These functions include the COUNTIF() and SUMIF() functions, as described in the next two sections.

COUNTIF(): Counting Only the Cells You Specify To understand the purpose of COUNTIF() and SUMIF(), you need to remember that the COUNT() and SUM() functions devour everything in their path. But what if you want to pick out specific cells in a range and count or sum only these cells? You might try to use COUNT() or SUM() in conjunction with an IF() statement, but that doesn’t solve the problem. Consider the following formula: =IF(ISBLANK(A1), 0, COUNT(A1:A10))

This formula checks to see if cell A1 is blank. If it’s blank, the formula returns 0. If it isn’t blank, the formula returns the count of all the numeric values from A1 to A10. As you can see, the actual counting operation’s an all-or-nothing affair. Excel either counts all of the cells or ignores them all. There’s no way to count just some of the cells (or, similarly, add just some of the cells). The COUNTIF() and SUMIF() functions address this issue by letting you specify a condition for each cell.

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The COUNTIF() function is the more straightforward of the two. It takes two parameters: the range of cells you want to count, and the criteria that a cell needs to satisfy in order to be counted: COUNTIF(range, criteria)

The criteria argument is the key to unlocking the real power of COUNTIF(). The formula tests every cell in your range to see if it meets your criteria, and counts it only if it does. With the criteria you can: • Test if a cell matches a specific value. • Test if a cell is greater or less than a specific number. • Test if a cell matches, or is greater or less than, a number in another cell. • Test if a cell contains text that matches a simple pattern. Consider the list of products shown in Figure 13-1, which stretches from row 2 to 42. Counting the number of products is easy—you just use the plain-vanilla count function: =COUNT(A2:A42)

This formula returns 41, which is the total number of nonblank cells in the range. Now, what if you want to count the number of products with a price over $500? This challenge calls for the COUNTIF() function. Here’s the formula: =COUNTIF(C2:C42, ″>500″)

Note that, in this case, the formula counts the cells in column C. That’s because column C contains the price information for each product, which you need in order to evaluate the condition. (When using the COUNTIF() function, the condition in the second argument’s always a string, which means you need to make sure to place it inside quotation marks.)

Figure 13-1: This worksheet shows a list of products. The COUNT() function makes it easy to count the products, but COUNTIF() gives you the additional ability to count only those products that reach a set price threshold or are in a certain category.

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To understand how the criteria argument works, you need to realize that it’s not a logical condition like the ones used with the IF() statement. Instead, it’s a snippet of text that contains part of a condition. When COUNTIF() springs into action, it creates a full condition for each cell in its assigned range. In the formula shown earlier, the criteria is >500. Each time the COUNTIF() function tests a cell, it uses this criteria to generate a full-fledged condition on the fly. The first cell in the range is C2, so the condition becomes C2>500. If the condition is true (and for C2, in Figure 13-1, it is), COUNTIF() counts the cell. Using this logic, you can easily construct other conditional counting formulas. Here’s how you’d count all the products in the Travel category (column D) by examining the cells in the Category column: =COUNTIF(D2:D42, ″=Travel″)

Tip: If your condition uses the equal sign, you can omit it. For example, COUNTIF() assumes that the condition “Travel” is equivalent to “=Travel”.

You can even draw the information you want to use in your condition from another cell. In this case, you simply need to use the text concatenation operator (&) to join the cell value with the conditional operator you want to use. (See page 316 for an explanation of how concatenation works.) If the reader of your spreadsheet enters the category name in cell G1, you could count matching products using the following formula: =COUNTIF(D2:D42, ″=″ & G1)

This formula joins the equal sign to whatever text is in cell G1. Thus, if G1 has the text Tools, the criteria becomes “=Tools”. You can use a similar technique to use a function in the criteria argument. Here’s a formula that counts the number of products that are above the average price: =COUNTIF(C2:C42, ″>″ & AVERAGE(C2:C42))

SUMIF(): Adding Only the Cells You Specify The SUMIF() function follows the same principle as COUNTIF(). The only difference is that it accepts an optional third argument: SUMIF(test_range, criteria, [sum_range])

The first argument is the range of cells you want the criteria to test, the second is the criteria itself, and the third is the range of cells you want to sum. So if the first cell in the test_range passes the test (that is, causes the criteria to evaluate to true), the function adds whatever the first cell is in the sum_range to the total sum. Both the test_ range and sum_range must have the same number of cells—usually they’ll be different columns in the same table.

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SIDEBARTYPE

How Excel Compares Different Types of Data The type of data that’s in a cell—ordinary numbers, text, or dates—influences how Excel compares it in a condition. If you use the greater than (>) and less than (500″)

Along with COUNTIF() and SUMIF(), Excel has one more IF-formula: AVERAGEIF(), which calculates the average of cells that fit set criteria. Figure 13-2 shows an example.

COUNTIFS() and SUMIFS(): Counting and Summing Using Multiple Criteria The COUNTIF(), SUMIF(), and AVERAGEIF() functions suffer from one limitation: They can evaluate cells using only one criterion. Fortunately, Excel has a set of matching functions that don’t have this restriction. They have the same names as the functions you’ve already learned about, with an S added at the end: • SUMIFS() is the same as SUMIF(), except it accepts multiple conditions.

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Figure 13-2: Here are two approaches to calculate an average. The formula in B13 ignores all scores of 0, which represent students who didn’t take the test. The result of 78 percent (returned by the AVERAGEIF() function) is clearly quite a bit higher than the value of 69 percent and change (returned by the AVERAGE() function), but it’s a more realistic representation of student performance.

• COUNTIFS() is the same as COUNTIF(), except it accepts multiple conditions. • AVERAGEIFS() is the same as AVERAGEIF(), except it accepts multiple conditions. If you’re truly demanding, you’ll be happy to know that all three of these functions accept over 100 separate conditions. Earlier in this chapter you saw how you could use COUNTIF() either to count the number of products over $500 or to count the number of travel products in the list. But what if you want to use both conditions at once—in other words, you want to zero in on just those travel products that pass the $500 threshold? In this situation, you need COUNTIFS() to evaluate your two conditions. The following explanation builds the formula you need one piece at a time. (See Figure 13-1 if you need help visualizing the spreadsheet that this formula is searching.) The first argument for COUNTIFS() identifies the range you want to use to evaluate your first condition. In this example, this first condition tests whether a product’s in the Travel category. In order to test this condition, you need to grab the entire Category column, like so: =COUNTIFS(D2:D42, ...)

Now, you need to fill in the condition that Excel uses to test each value. In this case, you need a condition that checks that the value matches the text “Travel”: =COUNTIFS(D2:D42, "=Travel", ...)

The fun doesn’t stop here. You can use the same technique to fill in the second condition, which looks for prices that exceed $500 dollars. Once again, you fill in the range you want to use (this time it’s the Price column) and the condition: =COUNTIFS(D2:D42, ″=Travel″, C2:C42, ">500")

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This COUNTIFS() function counts only products that meet both conditions. However, you can continue this process by tacking on more and more range and condition arguments to make ridiculously stringent conditions. Note: When you use the COUNTIFS() function, all your ranges need to be exactly the same size. (In other words, they need to have the same number of cells.) If you break this rule, Excel becomes terribly confused and shows you the #VALUE! error. After all, the idea is that you’re looking at different parts of the same list, and it wouldn’t make sense for one column to be longer than another one in the same table.

The SUMIFS() function works in a similar way. It’s different because the range you want to sum up may not match the ranges you want to use to evaluate your conditions. To clear up any confusion, you add an extra argument right at the beginning of the formula, which identifies the cells you want to add up. The following formula calculates the total of all products between $500 and $1,000— a feat that’s impossible with SUMIF(). =SUMIFS(C2:C42, C2:C42, ″>500″, C2:C42, ″